
Book L„_ 



PI^):SKNTHIJ BY 



EARLY THEORIES OF 
TRANSLATION 



BY 

FLORA ROSS AMOS 




Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Require- 



ments FOR the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 

in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia 

University 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1920 



Columbia Winihmitv 

STUDIES IN ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE 
LITERATURE 



EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 



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EAELY THEOEIES OF 
TRANSLATION 



BY 

FLORA ROSS AMOS 



Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Require- 
ments FOR THE Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 
IN the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia 
University 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1920 




Copyright, 1920 
By Columbia University Press 



Printed from type, December, 1919 



Gift 

University 



Printed by The Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



TO 

MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER 



This Monograph has been approved by the Department of 
English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University 
as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication. 

A. H. THORNDIKE, 

Executive Officer 



PREFACE 

In the following pages I have attempted to trace certain 
developments in the theory of translation as it has been 
formulated by English writers. I have confined myself, of 
necessity, to such opinions as have been put into words, and 
avoided making use of deductions from practice other than 
a few obvious and generally accepted conclusions. The 
procedure involves, of course, the omission of some important 
elements in the history of the theory of translation, in that 
it ignores the discrepancies between precept and practice, 
and the influence which practice has exerted upon theory; 
on the other hand, however, it confines a subject, other- 
wise impossibly large, within measurable limits. The chief 
emphasis has been laid upon the sixteenth century, the period 
of the most enthusiastic experimentation, when, though it 
was still possible for the translator to rest in the comfortable 
medieval conception of his art, the New Learning was offer- 
ing new problems and new ideals to every man who shared 
in the intellectual awakening of his time. In the matter of 
theory, however, the age was one of beginnings, of sugges- 
tions, rather than of finished, definitive results ; even by the 
end of the century there were still translators who had not 
yet appreciated the immense difference between medieval 
and modern standards of translation. To understand their 
position, then, it is necessary to consider both the preceding 
period, with its incidental, half-unconscious comment, and 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their system- 
atized, unified contribution. This last material, in especial, 
is included chiefly because of the light which it throws in 
retrospect on the views of earlier translators, and only the 



X PREFACE 

main course of theory, by this time fairly easy to follow, is 
traced. 

The aim has in no case been to give bibhographical infor- 
mation. A number of translations, important in themselves, 
have received no mention because they have evoked no com- 
ment on methods. The references given are not necessarily 
to first editions. Generally speaking, it has been the prefaces 
to translations that have yielded material, and such prefaces, 
especially during the Ehzabethan period, are likely to be in- 
cluded or omitted in different editions for no very clear 
reasons. Quotations have been modernized, except in the 
case of Middle English verse, where the original form has 
been kept for the sake of the metre. 

The history of the theory of translation is by no means 
a record of easily distinguishable, orderly progression. It 
shows an odd lack of continuity. Those who give rules for 
translation ignore, in the great majority of cases, the con- 
tribution of their predecessors and contemporaries. Towards 
the beginning of Elizabeth's reign a small group of critics 
bring to the problems of the translator both technical scholar- 
ship and alert, original minds, but apparently the new and 
significant ideas which they offer have httle or no effect on 
the general course of theory. Again, Tytler, whose Essay 
on the Principles on Translation, pubhshed towards the end 
of the eighteenth century, may with some reason claim to 
be the first detailed discussion of the questions involved, 
declares that, with a few exceptions, he has ''met with 
nothing that has been written professedly on the subject," 
a statement showing a surprising disregard for the elaborate 
prefaces that accompanied the translations of his own 
century. 

This lack of consecutiveness in criticism is probably par- 
tially accountable for the slowness with which translators 
attained the power to put into words, clearly and unmis- 
takably, their aims and methods. Even if one were to leave 



PREFACE xi 

aside the childishly vague comment of medieval writers and 
the awkward attempts of EHzabethan translators to describe 
their processes, there would still remain in the modern period 
much that is careless or misleading. The very term "trans- 
lation" is long in defining itself; more difficult terms, 
like "faithfulness" and "accuracy," have widely different 
meanings with different writers. The various kinds of Hter- 
ature are often treated in the mass with httle attempt at 
discrimination between them, regardless of the fact that 
the problems of the translator vary with the character of his 
original. Tytler's book, full of interesting detail as it is, 
turns from prose to verse, from lyric to epic, from ancient to 
modern, till the effect it leaves on the reader is fragmentary 
and confusing. 

Moreover, there has never been uniformity of opinion 
with regard to the aims and methods of translation. Even 
in the age of Pope, when, if ever, it was safe to be dogmatic 
and when the theory of translation seemed safely on the way 
to become standardized, one still hears the voices of a few 
recalcitrants, voices which become louder and more numerous 
as the century advances; in the nineteenth century the 
most casual survey discovers conflicting views on matters 
of fundamental importance to the translator. Who are to 
be the readers, who the judges, of a translation are obvi- 
ously questions of primary significance to both translator 
and critic, but they are questions which have never been 
authoritatively settled. When, for example, Caxton in the 
fifteenth century uses the "curious" terms which he thinks 
will appeal to a clerk or a noble gentleman, his critics com- 
plain because the common people cannot understand his 
words. A similar situation appears in modern times when 
Arnold lays down the law that the judges of an Enghsh 
version of Homer must be "scholars, because scholars alone 
have the means of really judging him," and Newman 
rephes that "scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but 



xii PREFACE 

of Taste the educated but unlearned public must be the 
only rightful judge." 

Again, critics have been hesitant in defining the all-im- 
portant term ''faithfulness." To one writer fidelity may 
imply a reproduction of his original as nearly as possible 
word for word and fine for line; to another it may mean an 
attempt to carry over into English the spirit of the original, 
at the sacrifice, where necessary, not only of the exact words 
but of the exact substance of his source. The one extreme 
is likely to result in an awkward, more or less unintelligible 
version; the other, as illustrated, for example, by Pope's 
Homer, may give us a work so modified by the personality 
of the translator or by the prevailing taste of his time as to 
be almost a new creation. But while it is easy to point out 
the defects of the two methods, few critics have had the 
courage to give fair consideration to both possibihties; to 
treat the two aims, not as mutually exclusive, but as com- 
plementary; to realize that the spirit and the letter may be 
not two but one. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas 
North translated from the French Amyot's wise observa- 
tion: ''The office of a fit translator consisteth not only 
in the faithful expressing of his author's meaning, but 
also in a certain resembling and shadowing forth of the 
form of his style and manner of his speaking"; but few 
Enghsh critics, in the period under our consideration, 
grasped thus firmly the essential connection between 
thought and style and the consequent responsibility of the 
translator. 

Yet it is those critics who have faced all the difficulties 
boldly, and who have urged upon the translator both due 
regard for the original and due regard for English literary 
standards who have made the most valuable contributions 
to theory. It is much easier to set the standard of transla- 
tion low, to settle matters as does Mr. Chesterton in his 
casual disposition of Fitzgerald's Omar: "It is quite clear 



PREFACE xm 

that Fitzgerald's work is much too good to be a good trans- 
lation." We can, it is true, point to few realizations of the 
ideal theory, but in approaching a Uterature which possesses 
the Enghsh Bible, that marvelous union of faithfulness to 
source with faithfulness to the genius of the English lan- 
guage, we can scarcely view the problem of translation thus 
hopelessly. 

The most stimulating and suggestive criticism, indeed, has 
come from men who have seen in the very difficulty of the 
situation opportunities for achievement. While the more 
cautious grammarian has ever been doubtful of the quaUty 
of the translator's English, fearful of the introduction of 
foreign words, foreign idioms, to the men who have cared 
most about the destinies of the vernacular, — men like 
Caxton, More, or Dryden, — translation has appeared not 
an enemy to the mother tongue, but a means of enlarging 
and clarifying it. In the time of Elizabeth the translator 
often directed his appeal more especially to those who loved 
their country's language and wished to see it become a more 
adequate medium of expression. That he should, then, 
look upon translation as a promising experiment, rather than 
a doubtful compromise, is an essential characteristic of the 
good critic. 

The necessity for open-mindedness, indeed, in some degree 
accounts for the tentative quality in so much of the theory 
of translation. Translation fills too large a place, is too 
closely connected with the whole course of Hterary develop- 
ment, to be disposed of easily. As each succeeding period 
has revealed new fashions in literature, new avenues of 
approach to the reader, there have been new translations 
and the theorist has had to reverse or revise the opinions 
bequeathed to him from a previous period. The theory 
of translation cannot be reduced to a rule of thumb ; it must 
again and again be modified to include new facts. Thus 
regarded it becomes a vital part of our literary history, and 



XIV PREFACE 

has significance both for those who love the EngHsh language 
and for those who love EngUsh Uterature. 

In conclusion, it remains only to mention a few of my many 
obHgations. To the hbraries of Princeton and Harvard as 
well as Colxmabia University I owe access to much useful 
material. It is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness 
to Professors Ashley H. Thorndike and WiUiam W. Lawrence 
and to Professor William H. Hulme of Western Reserve 
University for helpful criticism and suggestions. In especial 
I am deeply grateful to Professor George Phihp Krapp, 
who first suggested this study and who has given me con- 
stant encouragement and guidance throughout its course. 

Apnl, 1919. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Medieval Period 3 

II. The Translation op the Bible 49 

III. The Sixteenth Century 81 

IV. From Cowley to Pope 135 

Index 181 



XV 



I. THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 



EAELY 
THEOKIES OF TRANSLATION 

I 

THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

From the comment of Anglo-Saxon writers one may derive 
a not inadequate idea of the attitude generally prevail- 
ing in the medieval period with regard to the treatment 
of material from foreign sources. Suggestive statements 
appear in the prefaces to the works associated with the name 
of Alfred. One method of translation is employed in produc- 
ing an EngHsh version of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care. "I 
began," runs the preface, ''among other various and manifold 
troubles of this kingdom, to translate into English the book 
which is called in Latin Pastoralis, and in English Shepherd^s 
Book, sometimes word by word, and sometimes according to 
the sense." ^ A similar practice is described in the Proem 
to The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius. ''King Alfred 
was the interpreter of this book, and turned it from book 
Latin into English, as it is now done. Now he set forth 
word by word, now sense from sense, as clearly and intel- 
ligently as he was able." ^ The preface to >S^. Augustine's 
Soliloquies, the beginning of which, unfortunately, seems 
to be lacking, suggests another possible treatment of borrowed 
material. "I gathered for myself," writes the author, 
"cudgels, and stud-shafts, and horizontal shafts, and helves 

1 Trans, in Gregory's Pastoral Care, ed. Sweet, E. E. T. S., p. 7. 

2 Trans, in King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius, 
trans. Sedgefield, 1900. 

3 



4 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

for each of the tools that I could work with, and bow-timbers 
and bolt-timbers for every work that I could perform, the 
comeliest trees, as many as I could carry. Neither came I 
with a burden home, for it did not please me to bring all 
the wood back, even if I could bear it. In each tree I saw 
something that I needed at home; therefore I advise each 
one who can, and has many wains, that he direct his steps 
to the same wood where I cut the stud-shafts. Let him 
fetch more for himself, and load his wains with fair beams, 
that he may wind many a neat wall, and erect many a rare 
house, and build a fair town, and therein may dwell merrily 
and softly both winter and summer, as I have not yet done."^ 
Aelfric, writing a century later, develops his theories in 
greater detail. Except in the Preface to Genesis, they are 
expressed in Latin, the language of the lettered, a fact which 
suggests that, unhke the translations themselves, the prefaces 
were addressed to readers who were, for the most part, 
opposed to translation into the vernacular and who, in 
addition to this, were in all probabihty especially suspicious 
of the methods employed by Aelfric. These methods were 
strongly in the direction of popularization. Aelfric's general 
practice is hke that of Alfred. He declares repeatedly ^ that 
he translates sense for sense, not always word for word. 
Furthermore, he desires rather to be clear and simple than 
to adorn his style with rhetorical ornament.^ Instead of 
unfamiliar terms, he uses 'Hhe pure and open words of the 
language of this people." * In connection with the trans- 
lation of the Bible he lays down the principle that Latin must 
give way to Enghsh idiom.^ For all these things Aelfric has 

1 Trans, in Hargrove, King Alfred's Old English Version of St. Augus- 
tine's Soliloquies, 1902, pp. xliii-xliv. 

2 Latin Preface of the Catholic Homilies I, Latin Preface of the Ldves 
of the Saints, Preface of Pastoral Letter for Archbishop Wulfstan. All of 
these are conveniently accessible in White, Aelfric, Chap. XIII. 

2 Latin Preface to Homilies II. 

4 Ibid. ^ Preface to Genesis. 



I 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 5 

definite reasons. Keeping always in mind a clear concep- 
tion of the nature of his audience, he does whatever seems 
to him necessary to make his work attractive and, con- 
sequently, profitable. Preparing his Grammar for '' tender 
youths," though he knows that words may be interpreted 
in many ways, he follows a simple method of interpretation 
in order that the book may not become tiresome.^ The 
Homilies, intended for simple people, are put into simple 
English, that they may more easily reach the hearts of those 
who read or hear.^ This popularization is extended even 
farther. Aelfric explains ^ that he has abbreviated both the 
Homilies ^ and the Lives of the Saints,^ again of dehberate 
purpose, as appears in his preface to the latter: "Hoc 
sciendum etiam quod prolixiores passiones breuiamus verbis 
non adeo sensu, ne fastidiosis ingeratur tedium si tanta 
prolixitas erit in propria lingua quanta est in latina." 

Incidentally, however, Aelfric makes it evident that his 
were not the only theories of translation which the period 
afforded. In the preface to the first collection of Homilies 
he anticipates the disapproval of those who demand greater 
closeness in following originals. He recognizes the fact 
that his translation may displease some critics '^quod non 
semper verbum ex verbo, aut quod breviorem expUcationem 
quam tractatus auctorum habent, sive non quod per 
ordinem ecclesiastici ritus omnia EvangeHa percurrimus." 
The Preface to Genesis suggests that the writer was famihar 
with Jerome's insistence on the necessity for unusual 
faithfulness in translating the Bible.^ Such comment 
implies a mind surprisingly awake to the problems of 
translation. 

1 Latin Preface of the Grammar. ^ Latin Preface to Homilies 7. 

3 In the selections from the Bible various passages, e.g., genealogies, 
are omitted without comment. 

* Latin Preface to Homilies I. ^ Latin Preface. 

^ For further comment, see Chapter II. 



6 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

The translator who left the narrow path of word for word 
reproduction might, in this early period, easily be led into 
greater deviations from source, especially if his own creative 
abihty came into play. The preface to St. Augustine^s 
Soliloquies quoted above carries with it a stimulus, not only 
to translation or compilation, but to work hke that of 
Caedmon or Cynewulf, essentially original in many respects, 
though based, in the main, on material already given hterary 
shape in other languages. Both characteristics are recog- 
nized in Anglo-Saxon comment. Caedmon, according to 
the famous passage in Bede, ''all that he could learn by 
hearing meditated with himself, and, as a clean animal 
ruminating, turned into the sweetest verse." ^ Cynewulf in 
his Elene, gives us a remarkable piece of author's comment ^ 
which describes the action of his own mind upon material 
already committed to writing by others. On the other 
hand, it may be noted that the Andreas, based Uke the 
Elene on a single written source, contains no hint that the 
author owes anything to a version of the story in another 
language.^ 

In the EngUsh Hterature which developed in course of 
time after the Conquest the methods of handling borrowed 
material were similar in their variety to those we have 
observed in Anglo-Saxon times. Translation, faithful 
except for the omission or addition of certain passages, 
compilation, epitome, all the gradations between the 
close rendering and such an individual creation as 
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, are exemplified in the 

1 Trans, in Thorpe, Cctedmon's Metrical Pharaphrase, London, 1832, 

p. XXV. 

2 LI. 1238 ff. For trans, see The Christ of Cynewulf, ed. Cook, 
pp. xlvi-xlviii. 

3 Cf. comment on 1. 1, in Introduction to Andreas, ed. Krapp, 1906, 
p. lii: "The Poem opens with the conventional formula of the epic, 
citing tradition as the source of the story, though it is all plainly of 
literary origin." 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 7 

works appearing from the thirteenth century on. When 
Lydgate, as late as the fifteenth century, describes one 
of the processes by which Hterature is produced, we are 
reminded of Anglo-Saxon comment. "Laurence,"^ the 
poet's predecessor in translating Boccaccio's Falls of 
Princes, is represented as 

In his Prologue affirming of reason, 
That artificers having exercise, 
May chaunge & turne by good discretion 
Shapes & formes, & newly them devise: 
As Potters whiche to that craft entende 
Breake & renue their vessels to amende. 



And semblably these clerkes in writing 

Thing that was made of auctours them beforn 

They may of newe finde & fantasye: 

Out of olde chaffe trye out full fayre corne, 

Make it more freshe & lusty to the eye, 

Their subtile witte their labour apply, 

With their colours agreable of hue. 

To make olde thinges for to seme newe.^ 

The great majority of these Middle English works con- 
tain within themselves no clear statement as to which of the 
many possible methods have been employed in their pro- 
duction. As in the case of the Anglo-Saxon Andreas, a 
retelUng in English of a story already existing in another 
language often presents itself as if it were an original com- 
position. The author who puts into the vernacular of his 
country a French romance may call it '^my tale." At the 
end of Launfal, a version of one of the lays of Marie de 
France, appears the declaration, ''Thomas Chestre made 
this tale." ^ The terms used to characterize hterary pro- 
ductions and literary processes often have not their modern 
connotation. ''Translate" and "translation" are applied 

1 I.e. Laurent de Premierfait. ^ Bochas' Falls of Princes, 1558. 
3 Ed. Ritson, 11. 1138-9. 



8 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

very loosely even as late as the sixteenth century. The 
Legend of Good Women names Troilus and Criseyde beside 
The Romance of the Rose as ''translated" work.^ Osbern 
Bokenam, writing in the next century, explains that he 
obtained the material for his legend of St. Margaret "the last 
time I was in Italy, both by scripture and eke by mouth," 
but he still calls the work a "translation." ^ Henry Brad- 
shaw, purposing in 1513 to "translate" into EngUsh the 
life of St. Werburge of Chester, declares. 

Unto this rude werke najrae auctours these shalbe : 
Fyrst the true legende and the venerable Bede, 
Mayster Alfrydus and Wyllyam Malusburye, 
Gyrarde, Polychronicon, and other mo in deed.^ 

Lydgate is requested to translate the legend of St. Giles 
"after the tenor only"; he presents his work as a kind of 
"brief compilation," but he takes no exception to the word 
"translate."^ That he should designate his St. Margaret, 
a fairly close following of one source, a "compilation,"^ 
merely strengthens the behef that the terms "translate" 
and "translation" were used synonymously with various 
other words. Osbern Bokenam speaks of the "translator" 
who "compiled" the legend of St. Christiana in English;^ 
Chaucer, one remembers, "translated" Boethius and "made" 
the hfe of St. CeciUa.'^ 

To select from this large body of literature, "made," 

1 A version, 11. 341-4. Cf. Puttenham, "... many of his books 
be but bare translations out of the Latin and French ... as his books 
of Troilus and Cresseid, and the Romant of the Rose," Gregory Smith, 
Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 64. 

2 Osbern Bokenam's Legenden, ed. Horstmann, 1883, 11. 108-9, 124. 

3 The Life of St. Werburge, E. E. T. S., 11. 94. ,127-130, 

* Minor Poems of Lydgate, E. E. T. S., Legend of St. Gyle, 11. 9-10, 
27-32. 

^ Ibid., Legend of St. Margaret, 1. 74. 

s St. Christiana, 1. 1028. ^ Legend of Good Women, 11. 425-6. 



1 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 9 

^'compiled/' "translated," only such works as can claim to 
be called, in the modern sense of the word, "translations" 
would be a difficult and unprofitable task. Rather one must 
accept the situation as it stands and consider the whole mass 
of such writings as appear, either from the claims of their 
authors or on the authority of modern scholarship, to be of 
secondary origin. "Translations" of this sort are numerous. 
Chaucer in his own time was reckoned "grant translateur." ^ 
Of the books which Caxton a century later issued from his 
printing press a large proportion were English versions 
of Latin or French works. Our concern, indeed, is with 
the larger and by no means the least valuable part 
of the literature produced during the Middle English 
period. 

The theory which accompanies this nondescript collec- 
tion of translations is scattered throughout various works, 
and is somewhat liable to misinterpretation if taken out of 
its immediate context. Before proceeding to consider it, 
however, it is necessary to notice certain phases of the gen- 
eral literary situation which created peculiar difficulties for 
the translator or which are likely to be confusing to the 
present-day reader. As regards the translator, existing 
circumstances were not encouraging. In the early part of 
the period he occupied a very lowly place. As compared 
with Latin, or even with French, the Enghsh language, 
undeveloped and unstandardized, could make its appeal 
only to the unlearned. It had, in the words of a thirteenth- 
century translator of Bishop Grosseteste's Castle of Love, 
"no savor before a clerk." ^ Sometimes, it is true, the 
English writer had the stimulus of patriotism. The trans- 
lator of Richard Coeur de Lion feels that Englishmen ought 

1 See the ballade by Eustache Deschamps, quoted in Chaucer, 
Works, ed. Morris, vol. 1, p. 82. 

2 Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, Pt. 1, E. E. T. S., The Castle of 
Love, 1. 72. 



10 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

to be able to read in their own tongue the exploits of the 
English hero. The Cursor Mundi is translated 

In to Inglis tong to rede 
For the love of Inglis lede, 
Inglis lede of Ingland.^ 

But beyond this there was little to encourage the translator. 
His audience, as compared with the learned and the refined, 
who read Latin and French, was ignorant and undiscrimi- 
nating; his crude medium was entirely unequal to repro- 
ducing what had been written in more highly developed 
languages. It is little wonder that in these early days his 
English should be termed "dim and dark." Even after 
Chaucer had showed that the despised language was cap- 
able of grace and charm, the writer of less genius must 
often have felt that beside the more sophisticated Latin 
or French, English could boast but scanty resources. 

There were difficulties and limitations also in the choice of 
material to be translated. Throughout most of the period 
literature existed only in manuscript; there were few large 
collections in any one place; travel was not easy. Priests, 
according to the prologue to Mirk's Festial, written in the 
early fifteenth century, complained of ''default of books." 
To aspire, as did Chaucer's Clerk, to the possession of 
''twenty books" was to aspire high. Translators occasion- 
ally give interesting details regarding the circumstances 
under which they read and translated. The author of the 
fife of St. Etheldred of Ely refers twice, with a certain pride, 
to a manuscript preserved in the abbey of Godstow which 
he himself has seen and from which he has drawn some of the 
facts which he presents. The translator of the alliterative 
romance of Alexander "borrowed" various books when he 
undertook his English rendering. ^ Earl Rivers, returning 
from the Continent, brought back a manuscript which had 

1 E. E. T. S., Cotton Vesp. MS. 11. 233-5. ^ e. E. T. S., 1. 457. 



I 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 11 

been lent him by a French gentleman, and set about the 
translation of his Dictes and Sayings of the Old Philosophers.^ 
It is not improbable that there was a good deal of borrowing, 
with its attendant inconveniences. Even in the sixteenth 
century Sir Thomas Elyot, if we may believe his story, was 
hampered by the laws of property. He became interested 
in the acts and wisdom of Alexander Severus, ''which book,'' 
he says, "was first written in the Greek tongue by his secre- 
tary Eucolpius and by good chance was lent unto me by a 
gentleman of Naples called Padericus. In reading whereof 
I was marvelously ravished, and as it hath ever been mine 
appetite, I wished that it had been pubhshed in such a tongue 
as more men might understand it. Wherefore with all 
diligence I endeavored myself whiles I had leisure to trans- 
late it into English: albeit I could not so exactly perform 
mine enterprise as I might have done, if the owner had not 
importunately called for his book, whereby I was constrained 
to leave some part of the work untranslated." ^ William 
Paris — to return to the earlier period — has left on record 
a situation which stirs the imagination. He translated the 
legend of St. Cristine while a prisoner in the Isle of Man, the 
only retainer of his unfortunate lord, the Earl of Warwick, 
whose captivity he chose to share. 

He made this lyf e in ynglishe soo, 
As he satte in prison of stone, 
Ever as he myghte tent therto 
Whane he had his lordes service done.^ 

One is tempted to let the fancy play on the combination of 
circumstances that provided him with the particular manu- 
script from which he worked. It is easy, of course, to 
emphasize overmuch the scarcity and the inaccessibility of 

1 See Cambridge History of English Literature, v. 2, p. 313. 

2 Preface to The Image of Governance, 1549. 

' Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, ed. Horstmann, Christine, 
11. 517-20. 



12 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

texts, but it is obvious that the translator's choice of sub- 
ject was largely conditioned by opportunity. He did not 
select from the whole range of hterature the work which 
most appealed to his genius. It is a far cry from the 
Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, with its stress 
on individual choice. Rosconamon's advice, 

Examine how your humour is inclined, 
And what the ruling passion of your mind; 
Then seek a poet who your way does bend. 
And choose an author as you choose a friend, 

seems absurd in connection with the translator who had to 
choose what was within his reach, and who, in many cases, 
could not sit down in undisturbed possession of his source. 

The element of individual choice was also diminished by 
the intervention of friends and patrons. In the fifteenth 
century, when translators were becoming conmiunicative 
about their affairs, there is frequent reference to suggestion 
from without. Allowing for interest in the new craft of 
printing, there is still so much mention in Caxton's prefaces 
of commissions for translation as to make one feel that 
"ordering" an English version of some foreign book had 
become no unconamon thing for those who owned manuscripts 
and could afford such commodities as translations. Cax- 
ton's list ranges from The Fayttes of Armes, translated at the 
request of Henry VII from a manuscript lent by the king 
himself, to The Mirrour of the World, ''translated ... at the 
request, desire, cost, and dispense of the honorable and 
worshipful man, Hugh Bryce, alderman and citizen of 
London." i 

One wonders also how the source, thus chosen, presented 
itself to the translator's conception. His references to it 
are generally vague or confused, often positively misleading. 
Yet to designate with any definiteness a French or Latin 

1 Preface, E. E. T. S. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 13 

text was no easy matter. When one considers the labor 
that, of later years, has gone to the classification and identi- 
fication of old manuscripts, the awkward elaboration of 
nomenclature necessary to distinguish them, the com- 
plications resulting from missing pages and from the undue 
liberties of copyists, one realizes something of the position 
of the medieval translator. Even categories were not 
forthcoming for his convenience. The religious legend of 
St. Katherine of Alexandria is derived from ''chronicles";^ 
the moral tale of The Incestuous Daughter has its source in 
''romance"; 2 Grosseteste's allegory, The Castle of Love, is 
presented as "a romance of English . . . out of a romance 
that Sir Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, made." ^ The translator 
who explained "I found it written in old hand" was probably 
giving as adequate an account of his source as truth would 
permit. 

Moreover, part of the confusion had often arisen before 
the manuscript came into the hands of the English translator. 
Often he was engaged in translating something that was 
already a translation. Most frequently it was a French 
version of a Latin original, but sometimes its ancestry was 
complicated by the existence or the tradition of Greek 
or Hebrew sources. The medieval Troy story, with its 
list of authorities, Dictys, Dares, Guido delle Colonne — to 
cite the favorite names — shows the situation in an aggra- 
vated form. In such cases the earlier translator's blunders 
and omissions in describing his source were likely to be 
perpetuated in the new rendering. 

Such, roughly speaking, were the circumstances under 
which the translator did his work. Some of his peculiar 
difficulties are, approached from another angle, the dif- 
ficulties of the present-day reader. The presence of one or 

1 Capgrave, St. Katherine of Alexandria, E. E. T. S., Bk. 3, 1. 21. 

^ In Altenglische Legenden, Neue Folge, 1. 45. 

' Minor Poems of the Vernon MS. Pt. 1, Appendix, p. 407. 



14 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

more intermediary versions, a complication especially notice- 
able in England as a result of the French occupation after 
the Conquest, may easily mislead us. The originals of 
many of our texts are either non-extant or not yet discovered, 
but in cases where we do possess the actual source which the 
Enghsh writer used, a disconcerting situation often becomes 
evident. What at first seemed to be the English translator's 
conmient on his own treatment of source is frequently only 
a hteral rendering of a comment already present in his 
original. It is more convenient to discuss the details of 
such cases in another context, but any general approach to 
the theory of translation in Middle English literature must 
include this consideration. If we are not in possession of 
the exact original of a translation, our conclusions must 
nearly always be discounted by the possibility that not only 
the subject matter but the comment on that subject matter 
came from the French or Latin source. The pronoun of the 
first person must be regarded with a sHght suspicion. "I" 
may refer to the Englishman, but it may also refer to his 
predecessor who made a translation or a compilation in 
French or Latin. ' ' Compilation ' ' suggests another difficulty. 
Sometimes an apparent reference to source is only an appeal 
to authority for the confirmation of a single detail, an 
appeal which, again, may be the work of the Enghsh trans- 
lator, but may, on the other hand, be the contribution of 
his predecessor. A fairly common situation, for example, 
appears in John Capgrave's Life of St. Augustine, produced, 
as its author says, in answer to the request of a gentlewoman 
that he should 'translate her truly out of Latin the life of 
St. Augustine, great doctor of the church." Of the work, 
its editor, Mr. Munro, says, "It looks at first sight as though 
Capgrave had merely translated an older Latin text, as he 
did in the Life of St. Gilbert; but no Latin life corresponding 
to our text has been discovered, and as Capgrave never 
refers to ''myn auctour," and always alludes to himself as 



I 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 15 

handling the material, I incline to conclude that he is him- 
self the original composer, and that his reference to transla- 
tion signifies his use of Augustine's books, from which he 
translates whole passages." ^ In a case like this it is evi- 
dently impossible to draw dogmatic conclusions. It may- 
be that Capgrave is using the word 'translate" with medi- 
eval looseness, but it is also possible that some of the com- 
ment expressed in the first person is translated comment, 
and the editor adds that, though the balance of probability 
is against it, "it is still possible that a Latin life may have 
been used." Occasionally, it is true, comment is stamped 
unmistakably as belonging to the English translator. The 
translator of a Canticum de Creatione declares that there 
were 

— fro the incarnacioun of Jhesu 

Til this rym y telle yow 

Were turned in to englisch, 

A thousand thre hondred & seventy 

And fjrve yere witterly. 

Thus in bok founden it is.^ 

Such unquestionably English additions are, unfortunately, 
rare and the situation remains confused. 

But this is not the only difficulty which confronts the 
reader. He searches with disappointing results for such 
general and comprehensive statements of the medieval 
translator's theory as may aid in the interpretation of detail. 
Such statements are few, generally late in date, and, even 
when not directly translated from a predecessor, are obviously 
repetitions of the conventional rule associated with the name 
of Jerome and adopted in Anglo-Saxon times by Alfred and 
Aelfric. An early fifteenth-century translator of the Seer eta 
Secretorum, for example, carries over into English the preface 

1 Introduction to Capgrave, Lives of St. Augustine and St. Gilbert of 
Sempringham, E. E. T. S. 

2 Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, p. 138, IL 1183-8. 



16 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

of the Latin translator: ''I have translated with great 
travail into open understanding of Latin out of the language 
of Araby . . . sometimes expounding letter by letter, and 
sometimes understanding of understanding, for other manner 
of speaking is with Arabs and other with Latin." ^ Lydgate 
makes a similar statement: 

I wyl translate hyt sothly as I kan, 
After the lettre, in ordre effectuelly. 
Thogh I not folwe the wordes by & by, 
I schal not faille teuching the substance.^ 

Osbern Bokenam declares that he has translated 

Not wnrde for wurde — for that ne may be 
In no translation, aftyr Jeromys decree — 
But fro sentence to sentence. ^ 

There is httle attempt at the further analysis which would 
give this principle fresh significance. The translator makes 
scarcely any effort to define the extent to which he may 
diverge from the words of his original or to explain why such 
divergence is necessary. John de Trevisa, who translated so 
extensively in the later fourteenth century, does give some 
account of his methods, elementary, it is true, but honest 
and individual. His preface to his Enghsh prose version 
of Higden's Polychronicon explains: ''In some place I shall 
set word for word, and active for active, and passive for 
passive, a-row right as it standeth, without changing of the 
order of words. But in some place I must change the order 
of words, and set active for passive and again-ward. And 
in some place I must set a reason for a word and tell what it 
meaneth. But for all such changing the meaning shall 

1 Three Prose Versions of Secreta Secretorum, E. E. T. S., Epistle 
Dedicatory to second. 

2 The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, E. E. T. S., 

3 Osbern Bokenam's Legenden, St. Agnes, 11. 680-2. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 17 

stand and not be changed." ^ An explanation like this, 
however, is unusual. 

Possibly the fact that the translation was in prose affected 
Trevisa's theorizing. A prose rendering could follow its 
original so closely that it was possible to describe the com- 
paratively few changes consequent on English usage. In 
verse, on the other hand, the changes involved were so great 
as to discourage definition. There are, however, a few com- 
ments on the method's to be employed in poetical renderings. 
According to the Proem to the Boethius, Alfred, in the 
Anglo-Saxon period, first translated the book ''from Latin 
into Enghsh prose," and then ''wrought it up once more 
into verse, as it is now done." ^ At the very beginning of the 
history of Middle Enghsh Hterature Orm attacked the prob- 
lem of the verse translation very directly. He writes of his 
Ormulum : 

Ice hafe sett her o thiss boc 

Amang Godspelles wordess, 

All thurrh me selHenn, manig word 

The rime swa to fiUenn.^ 

Such additions, he says, are necessary if the readers are 
to understand the text and if the metrical form is to be kept. 

Forr whase mot to laewedd folic 
Larspell off Goddspell tellenn, 
He mot wel ekenn manig word 
Amang Godspelless Wordess. 
& ice ne mihhte nohht min ferrs 
Ayy withth Godspelless wordess 
Wel fillenn all, & all forrthi 
ShoUde ice wel offte nede 
Amang Godspelless wordess don 
Min word, min ferrs to fillenn.* 

* Epistle of Sir John Trevisa, in Pollard, Fifteenth Century Prose and 
Verse, p. 208. 

2 In Sedgefield, King Alfred's Version of Boethius. 

3 Ed. White, 1852, 11. 41-4. 4 u. 55-64. 



18 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Later translators, however, seldom followed his lead. There 
are a few comments connected with prose translations; the 
translator of The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry quotes 
the explanation of his author that he has chosen prose rather 
than verse "for to abridge it, and that it might be better and 
more plainly to be understood";^ the Lord in Trevisa's 
Dialogue prefixed to the Polychronicon desires a translation 
in prose, ''for commonly prose is more clear than rhyme, 
more easy and more plain to understand"; ^ but apparently 
the only one of Orm's successors to put into words his con- 
sciousness of the complications which accompany a metrical 
rendering is the author of The Romance of Partenay, whose 
epilogue runs : 

As ny as metre can conclude sentence, 
Cereatly by rew in it have I go. 
Nerehand stafe by staf, by gret diligence, 
Savyng that I most metre apply to; 
The wourdes meve, and sett here & ther so.' 

What follows, however, shows that he is concerned not so 
much with the peculiar difficulty of translation as with the 
general difficulty of ''forging" verse. Whether a man em- 
ploys Latin, French, or the vernacular, he continues. 

Be it in balede, vers, Rime, or prose, 

He most torn and wend, metrely to close.* 

Of explicit comment on general principles, then, there is 
but a small amount in connection with Middle English 
translations. Incidentally, however, writers let fall a good 
deal of information regarding their theories and methods. 
Such material must be interpreted with considerable caution, 
for although the most casual survey makes it clear that 
generally the translator felt bound to put into words 

1 E. E. T. S., Preface. 2 PoUard, ibid., p. 208. 

3 E. E. T. S.. 11. 6553-7. * LI. 6565-6. 



1 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 19 

something of his debt and his responsibility to his prede- 
cessors, yet one does not know how much significance should 
attach to this comment. He seldom offers clear, unmistak- 
able information as to his difficulties and his methods of 
meeting them. It is peculiarly interesting to come upon 
such explanation of processes as appears at one point in 
Capgrave's Life of St. Gilbert. In telling the story of a 
miracle wrought upon a sick man, Capgrave writes: "One 
of his brethren, which was his keeper, gave him this counsel, 
that he should wind his head with a certain cloth of linen 
which St. Gilbert wore. I suppose verily," continues the 
translator, "it was his alb, for mine author here setteth a 
word 'subucula,' which is both an alb and a shirt, and in the 
first part of this life the same author saith that this holy 
man wore next his skin no hair as for the hardest, nor Unen 
as for the softest, but he went with wool, as with the mean." ^ 
Such care for detail suggests the comparative methods later 
employed by the translators of the Bible, but whether or 
not it was common, it seldom found its way into words. 
The majority of writers acquitted themselves of the trans- 
lator's duty by introducing at intervals somewhat conven- 
tional references to source, "in story as we read," "in tale 
as it is told," "as saith the geste," "in rhyme I read," "the 
prose says," "as mine author doth write," "as it tells in the 
book," "so saith the French tale," "as saith the Latin." 
Tags like these are everywhere present, especially in verse, 
where they must often have proved convenient in eking out 
the metre. Whether they are to be interpreted literally is 
hard to determine. The reader of English versions can 
seldom be certain whether variants on the more ordinary 
forms are merely stylistic or result from actual differences in 
situation; whether, for example, phrases like "as I have heard 
tell," "as the book says," "as I find in parchment spell" 
are re wordings of the same fact or represent real distinctions. 
1 E. E. T. S., p. 125. 



20 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

One group of doubtful references apparently question the 
reliability of the written source. In most cases the seeming 
doubt is probably the result of awkward phrasing. State- 
ments like ''as the story doth us both write and mean," ^ 
''as the book says and true men tell us/' ^ "but the book us 
He/' ^ need have httle more significance than the sUghtly 
absurd declaration, 

The gospel nul I forsake nought 
Thaugh it be written in parchemyn.* 

Occasional more direct questionings incUne one, however, to 
take the matter a little more seriously. The translator of a 
Canticum de Creatione, strangely fabulous in content, pre- 
sents his material with the words, 

— as we finden in lectrure, 

I not whether it be in holy scripture.^ 

The author of one of the legends of the Holy Cross says, 

This tale, quether hit be il or gode, 
I fande hit writen of the rode. 
Mani tellis diverseli, 
For thai finde diverse stori.** 

Capgrave, in his legend of St. Katherine, takes issue un- 
mistakably with his source. 

In this reknyng myne auctour & I are too : 
ffor he accordeth not \\'ytz cronicles that ben olde, 
But diver syth from hem, & that in many thyngis. 
There he accordeth, ther I him hold; 

1 AUenglische Sammlung, Neue Folge, St. Etheldred Eliensis, I. 162. 

2 Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, Erasmus, 1. 4. 

3 Ihid., Magdalena, 1. 48. 

* Minor Poems of the Vernon MS., Pt. 1, St. Bernard's Lamentation, 
U. 21-2. 

^ Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, Fragment of Canticum de Crea- 
tione, 11. 49-50. 

s Legends of the Holy Rood, E. E. T. S., How the Holy Cross was found 
by St. HeUna, 11. 684-7. 



i 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 21 

And where he diversyth in ordre of theis kyngis, 
I leve hym, & to oder mennys rekenyngis 
I geve more credens whech be-fore hjnn and me 
Sette alle these men in ordre & degre.^ 

Except when this mistrust is made a justification for 
divergence from the original, these comments contribute 
little to our knowledge of the medieval translator's methods 
and need concern us httle. More needful of explanation is 
the reference which implies that the English writer is not 
working from a manuscript, but is reproducing something 
which he has heard read or recounted, or which he has 
read for himself at some time in the past. How is one to 
interpret phrases like that which introduces the story of 
Golagros and Gawain, ^'as true men me told,'' or that which 
appears at the beginning of Rauf C oily ear, ''heard I tell"? 
One explanation, obviously true in some cases, is that such 
references are only conventional. The concluding fines of 
Ywain and Gawin, 

Of them no more have I heard tell 
Neither in romance nor in spell,^ 

are simply a rough rendering of the French 

Ne ja plus n'en orroiz conter, 
S'an n'i vialt manconge ajoster.' 

On the other hand, the author of the long romance of Ipoma- 
don, which follows its source with a closeness which precludes 
all possibifity of reproduction from memory, has tacked on 
two references to hearing,* not only without a basis in the 
French but in direct contradiction to Hue de Rotelande's 
account of the source of his material. In Emare, "as I have 
heard minstrels sing in sawe" is apparently introduced as 

1 E. E. T. S., Bk. 1, 11. 684r-91. 2 Ed. Ritson, 11. 4027-8. 

3 Chevalier au Lyon, ed. W. L. Holland, 1886, 11. 6805-6. 

4 Ed. Kolbing, 1889, 11. 144, 4514. 



22 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

the equivalent of the more ordinary phrases "in tale as it 
is told" and ''in romance as we read/' ^ the second of which 
is scarcely compatible with the theory of an oral source. 

One cannot always, however, dispose of the reference to 
hearing so easily. Contemporary testimony shows that ht- 
erature was often transmitted by word of mouth. Thomas 
de Cabham mentions the " ioculatores, qui cantant gesta 
principum et vitam sanctorum"; ^ Robert of Brunne com- 
plains that those who sing or say the geste of Sir Tristram 
do not repeat the story exactly as. Thomas made it.^ Even 
though one must recognize the probabihty that sometimes 
the immediate oral source of the minstrel's tale may have 
been English, one cannot ignore the possibility that oc- 
casionally a "translated" saint's life or romance may have 
been the result of hearing a French or Latin narrative read 
or recited. A convincing example of reproduction from 
memory appears in the legend of St. Etheldred of Ely, whose 
author recounts certain facts, 

The whiche y founde in the abbey of Godstow y-wis, 
In hm-e legent as y dude there that tyme rede, 

and later presents other material, 

The whiche y say at Hely y-write.* 

Such evidence makes us regard with more attention the re- 
mark in Capgrave's *S^. Katherine, 

— right soo dede I lere 

Of cronycles whiche (that) I saugh last,^ 

or the Hues at the end of Roherd of Cisyle, 

1 E. E. T. S., 11. 319, 405, 216. 

2 See Chambers, The Medieval Stage, Appendix G. 
' Chronicle of England, ed. Furnivall, 11. 93-104. 

* Altenglische Legenden, Vita St. Etheldredae Eliensis, 11. 978-9, 1112. 
5 Bk. 4, 11. 129-130. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 23 

Al this is write withoute lyghe 
At Rome, to ben in memorye, 
At seint Petres cherche, I knowe.^ 

It is possible also that sometimes a vague phrase Uke **as 
the story says/' or "in tale as it is told," may signify hear- 
ing instead of reading. But in general one turns from con- 
sideration of the references to hearing with little more than 
an increased respect for the superior definiteness which be- 
longs to the mention of the "black letters," the "parchment," 
"the French book," or "the Latin book." 

Leaving the general situation and examining individual 
types of literature, one finds it possible to draw conclusions 
which are somewhat more definite. The metrical romance — 
to choose one of the most popular literary forms of the period 
— is nearly always garnished with references to source 
scattered throughout its course in a manner that awakens 
curiosity. Sometimes they do not appear at the beginning 
of the romance, but are introduced in large numbers towards 
the end; sometimes, after a long series of pages containing 
nothing of the sort, we begin to come upon them frequently, 
perhaps in groups, one appearing every few fines, so that 
their presence constitutes something like a quality of style. 
For example, in Bevis of Hamtoun^ and The Earl of Toulouse ^ 
the first references to source come between 11. 800 and 900; 
in Ywain and Gawin the references appear at 11. 9, 3209, and 
3669; ^ in The Wars of Alexander ^ there is a perpetual harp- 
ing on source, one phrase seeming to produce another. 

Occasionally one can find a reason for the insertion of the 
phrase in a given place. Sometimes its presence suggests 
that the translator has come upon an unfamiliar word. In 
Sir Eglamour of Artois, speaking of a bird that has carried 
off a child, the author remarks, "a griffin, saith the book, 

1 Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, II. 435-7. ^ E. E. T. S. 

' Ed. Ritson. " lUd. « E. E. T. S. 



24 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

he hight"; ^ in Partenay, in an attempt to give a vessel its 
proper name, the writer says, "I found in scriptm"e that it 
was a barge." ^ This impression of accuracy is most com- 
mon in connection with geographical proper names. In 
Torrent of Portyngale we have the name of a forest, ''of 
Brasill saith the book it was"; in Partonope of Blois we find 
''France was named those ilke days Galles, as mine author 
says,"^ or "Mine author telleth this church hight the church 
of Albigis." * In this same romance the reference to source 
accompanies a definite bit of detail, "The French book thus 
doth me tell, twenty waters he passed full fell." ^ Bevis of 
Hamtoun kills "forty Sarracens, the French saith." ^ As 
in the case of the last illustration, the translator frequently 
needs to cite his authority because the detail he gives is 
somewhat difficult of behef. In The Sege of Melayne the 
Christian warriors recover their horses miraculously "through 
the prayer of St. Denys, thus will the chronicle say";^ in 
The Romance of Partenay we read of a wondrous hght ap- 
pearing about a tomb, "the French maker saith he saw it 
with eye." ^ Sometimes these phrases suggest that metre 
and rhyme do not always flow easily for the EngUsh writer, 
and that in such difficulties a stock space-filler is convenient. 
Lines like those in Chaucer's Sir Thopas, 

And so bif el upon a day, 
Forsothe as I you telle may 
Sir Thopas wolde outride, 
and 



The briddes synge, it is no nay, 
The sparhauke and the papejay 



may easily be paralleled by passages containing references to 
source. 

1 Thornton Romances, 1. 848. (Here the writer is probably confused 
by the two words grype and griffin.) 2 g. E. T. S., 1. 1284. 

3 E. E. T. S., 1. 318. 4 LI. 6983-4. ^ l1. 688-9. 

• L. 3643. 7 E. E. T. S., 11. 523-4. « L. 6105. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 25 

A good illustration from almost every point of view of the 
significance and lack of significance of the appearance of 
these phrases in a given context is the version of the Alexander 
story usually called The Wars of Alexander. The frequent 
references to source in this romance occur in sporadic groups. 
The author begins by putting them in with some regularity 
at the beginnings of the passus into which he divides his 
narrative, but, as the -story progresses, he ceases to do so, 
perhaps forgets his first purpose. Sometimes the reference 
to source suggests accuracy: ''Ajid five and thirty, as I find, 
were in the river drowned."^ "Rhinoceros, as I read, the 
book them calls." ^ The strength of some authority is 
necessary to support the weight of the incredible marvels 
which the story-teller recounts. He tells of a valley full of 
serpents with crowns on their heads, who fed, "as the prose 
tells," on pepper, cloves, and ginger; ^ of enormous crabs 
with backs, "as the book says," bigger and harder than any 
common stone or cockatrice scales; ^ of the golden image of 
Xerxes, which on the approach of Alexander suddenly, "as 
tells the text," falls to pieces.^ He often has recourse to an 
authority for support when he takes proper names from the 
Latin. "Luctus it hight, the lettre and the line thus it 
calls." ^ The slayers of Darius are named Besan and Ana- 
bras, "as the book tells." ^ On the other hand, the sig- 
nification of the reference in its context can be shown to be 
very shght. As was said before, the writer soon forgets to 
insert it at the beginning of the new passus; there are plenty 
of marvels without any citation of authority to add to their 
credibility; and though the proper name carries its reference 
to the Latin, it is usually strangely distorted from its original 
form. So far as bearing on the immediate context is con- 
cerned, most of the references to source have little more 



1 E. E. T. S., 1. 4734. 


2 L. 4133. 


3 L. 5425. 


4 L. 3894. 


5 L. 2997. 


6 L. 2170. 


7 L. 2428. 







26 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

meaning than the ordinary tags, ''as I you say," ''as you may 
hear," or "as I understand." 

Apart, however, from the matter of context, one may make 
a rough classification of the romances on the ground of these 
references. Leaving aside the few narratives (e.g. Sir 
Percival of Galles, King Horn) which contain no suggestion 
that they are of secondary origin, one may distinguish two 
groups. There is, in the first place, a large body of romances 
which refer in general terms to their originals, but do not 
profess any responsibility for faithful reproduction; in the 
second place, there are some romances whose authors do 
recognize the claims of the original, which is in such cases 
nearly always definitely described, and frequently go so far 
as to discuss its style or the style to be adopted in the EngHsh 
rendering. The first group, which includes considerably 
more than half the romances at present accessible in print, 
affords a confused mass of references. As regards the least 
definite of these, one finds phrases so vague as to suggest 
that the author himself might have had difficulty in identify- 
ing his source, phrases where the omission of the article 
("in rhyme," "in romance," "in story") or the use of the 
plural ("as books say," "as clerks tell," "as men us told," 
"in stories thus as we read") deprives the words of most 
of their significance. Other references are more definite; 
the writer mentions "this book," "mine author," "the Latin 
book," "the French book." If these phrases are to be 
trusted, we may conclude that the English translator has 
his text before him; they aid little, however, in identifica- 
tion of that text. The fifty-six references in Malory's Morte 
d' Arthur to "the French book" give no particular clue to 
discovery of his sources. The common formula, "as the 
French book says," marks the highest degree of definiteness 
to which most of these romances attain. 

An interesting variant from the commoner forms is the 
reference to Rom, generally in the phrase "the book of 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 27 

Rom/' which appears in some of the romances. The ex- 
planation that Rom is a corruption of romance and that the 
hook of Rom is simply the book of romance or the book 
written in the romance language, French, can easily be sup- 
ported. In the same poem Rom alternates with romance: 
"In Rome this geste is chronicled," ''as the romance telleth," ^ 
''in the chronicles of Rome is the date," "in romance as we 
read." ^ Two versions of Octavian read, the one "in books 
of Rome," the other "in books of ryme." ^ On the other 
hand, there are peculiarities in the use of the word not so 
easy of explanation. It appears in a certain group of ro- 
mances, Octavian, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Sir Eglamour of 
Artois, Torrent of Portyngale, The Earl of Toulouse, all of 
which develop in some degree the Constance story, familiar 
in The Man of Law's Tale. In all of them there is reference 
to the city of Rome, sometimes very obvious, sometimes 
slight, but perhaps equally significant in the latter case be- 
cause it is introduced in an unexpected, unnecessary way. 
In Le Bone Florence of Rome the heroine is daughter of the 
Emperor of Rome, and, the tale of her wanderings done, the 
story ends happily with her reinstatement in her own city. 
Octavian is Emperor of Rome, and here again the happy 
conclusion finds place in that city. Sir Eglamour belongs to 
Artois, but he does betake himself to Rome to kill a dragon, 
an episode introduced in one manuscript of the story by 
the phrase "as the book of Rome says." ^ Though the scenes 
of Torrent of Portyngale are Portugal, Norway, and Calabria, 
the Emperor of Rome comes to the wedding of the hero, 
and Torrent himself is finally chosen Emperor, presumably 
of Rome. The Earl of Toulouse, in the romance of that 

1 The Earl of Toulouse, ed. Ritson, 11. 1213, 1197. 

2 2^g ^Q^ Florence of Rome, ed. Ritson, 11. 2174, 643. 

3 Ed. Sarrazin, 1885, note on 1. 10 of the two versions in Northern 
dialect. 

^ Thornton Romances, note on 1. 718. 



28 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

name, disguises himseK as a monk, and to aid in the illusion 
some one says of him during his disappearance, ''Gone is 
he to his own land: he dwells with the Pope of Rome." ^ 
The Emperor in this story is Emperor of Almaigne, but his 
name, strangely enough, is Diocletian. Again, in Octavian, 
one reads in the description of a feast, ''there was many a 
rich geste of Rome and of France," ^ which suggests a dis- 
tinction beween a geste of Rome and a geste of France. 
In Le Bone Florence of Rome appears the peculiar statement, 
"Pope Symonde this story wrote. In the chronicles of 
Rome is the date." ^ In this case the word Rome seems to 
have been taken literally enough to cause attribution of the 
story to the Pope. It is evident, then, that whether or not 
Rome is a corruption of romance, at any rate one or more of 
the persons who had a hand in producing these narratives 
must have interpreted the word hterally, and beheved that 
the book of Rome was a record of occurrences in the city of 
Rome.^ It is interesting to note that in The Man of Law^s 
Tale, in speaking of Maurice, the son of Constance, Chaucer 
introduces a reference to the Gesta Romanorum: 

In the old Romayn gestes may men fynde 
Maurice's lyf, I here it not in mynde. 

Such vagueness and uncertainty, if not positive misunder- 
standing with regard to source, are characteristic of many 
romances. It is not difficult to find explanations for this. 
The writer may, as was suggested before, be reproducing a 
story which he has only heard or which he has read at some 
earher time. Even if he has the book before him, it does not 
necessarily bear its author's name and it is not easy to des- 
cribe it so that it can be recognized by others. Generally 
speaking, his references to soiu'ce are honest, so far as they 

1 L. 1150. 2 LI. 1275-6. ^ l1. 2173-4. 

^ See Miss Rickert's comment in E. E. T. S. edition of Emare, 
p. xlviii. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 29 

go, and can be taken at their face value. Even in cases of 
apparent falsity explanations suggest themselves. There is 
nearly always the possibility that false or contradictory at- 
tributions, as, for example, the mention of ''book" and 
"books" or "the French book" and "the Latin book" as 
sources of the same romance, are merely stupidly literal 
renderings of the original. In The Romance of Partenay, one 
of the few cases where we have unquestionably the French 
original of the Englifeh romance, more than once an appar- 
ent reference to source in the English is only a close follow- 
ing of the French. "I found in scripture that it was 
a barge" corresponds with "Je treuve que c'estoit une 
barge"; "as saith the scripture" with "Ainsi que dient ly 
escrips"; 

For the Cronike doth treteth (sic) this brefly, 
More f erther wold go, mater finde might I 

with 

Mais en brief je m'en passeray 
Car la cronique en brief passe. 
Plus deisse, se plus trouvasse. ^ 

A similar situation has already been pointed out in Ywain 
and Gawin. The most marked example of contradictory 
evidence is to be found in Octavian, whose author alternates 
"as the French says" with "as saith the Latin." ^ Here, 
however, the nearest analogue to the Enghsh romance, which 
contains 1962 lines, is a French romance of 5371 lines, which 
begins by mentioning the "grans merueilles qui sont faites, 
et de latin en romanz traites." ^ It is not impossible that 
the English writer used a shorter version which emphasized 
this reference to the Latin, and that his too-faithful ad- 
herence to source had confusing results. But even if such 

1 English version, II. 1284, 2115, 5718-9; French version, Mellusine, 
ed. Michel, 1854, 11. 1446, 2302, 6150-2. 

2 LI. 407, 1359. 3 Ed. Vollmoller, 1883, 11. 5-6. 



30 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

contradictions cannot be explained, in the mass of undis- 
tinguished romances there is scarcely anything to suggest 
that the writer is trying to give his work a factitious value 
by misleading references to dignified sources. His faults, 
as in Ywain and Gawin, where the name of Chretien is not 
carried over from the French, are sins of omission, not com- 
mission. 

No hard and fast line of division can be drawn between the 
romances just discussed" and those of the second group, with 
their frequent and fairly definite references to their sources 
and to their methods of reproducing them. A rough chrono- 
logical division between the two groups can be made about 
the year 1400. William of Palerne, assigned by its editor 
to the year 1350, contains a shght indication of the coming 
change in the claim which its author makes to have accom- 
plished his task ''as fully as the French fully would ask." ^ 
Poems like Chaucer's KnighVs Tale and Franklin's Tale 
have only the vague references to source of the earlier period, 
though since they are presented as oral narratives, they 
belong less obviously to the present discussion. The vexed 
question of the signification of the references in Troilus and 
Criseyde is outside the scope of this discussion. Super- 
ficially considered, they are an odd minghng of the new and 
the old. Phrases like ''as to myn auctour listeth to devise" 
(III, 1817), "as techen bokes olde" (III, 91), "as wryten 
folk thorugh which it is in minde" (IV, 18) suggest the first 
group. The puzzling references to LoUius have a certain 
definiteness, and faithfulness to source is imphed in Unes 
like: 

And of his song nought only the sentence, 
As writ myn auctour called Lollius, 
But pleynly, save our tonges difference, 
I dar wel seyn, in al that Troilus 

1 E. E. T. S., 1. 5522. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 31 

Seyde in his song; lo! every word right thus 
As I shal seyn 
(I, 393-8) 



and 



I 



"For as myn auctour seyde, so seye I" (II, 18). 

But from the beginning of the new century, in the work of 
men like Lydgate and Caxton, a new habit of comment 
becomes noticeable. 

Less distinguished translators show a similar development. 
The author of The Holy Grail, Harry Lonelich, a London 
skinner, towards the end of his work makes frequent, if 
perhaps mistaken, attribution of the French romance to 

. . . myn sire Robert of Borron 

Whiche that this storie Al & som 

Owt Of the latyn In to the frensh torned he 

Be holy chirches Comandment sekerle,^ 

and makes some apology for the defects of his own style : 

And I, As An unkonning Man trewly 
Into Englisch have drawen this Story; 
And thowgh that to yow not plesyng It be, 
Yit that ful Excused ye wolde haven Me 
Of my necligence and unkonning.^ 

The Romance of Partenay is turned into English by a writer 
who presents himself very modestly: 

I not acqueynted of birth naturall 
With frenshe his very trew parfightnesse, 
Nor enpreyntyd is in mind cordiall; 
O word For other myght take by lachesse, 
Or peradventure by unconnyngesse.* 

He intends, however, to be a careful translator: 

As nighe as metre will conclude sentence, 
Folew I wil my president, 
Ryght as the frenshe wil yiff me evidence, 
Cereatly after myn entent,* 

1 E. E. T. S., Chap XLVI, 11. 496-9. ^ chap. LVI, 11. 521-5. 

» LI. 8-12. 4 LI. 15-18. 



32 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

and he ends by declaring that in spite of the impossibihty of 
giving an exact rendering of the French in Enghsh metre, he 
has kept very closely to the original. Sometimes, owing to 
the shortness of the French ' ^ staff es," he has reproduced in 
one line two hnes of the French, but, except for this, com- 
parison will show that the two versions are exactly aUke.^ 

The translator of Partonope of Blois does not profess such 
slavish faithfulness, though he does profess great admiration 
for his source, 

The olde booke full well I-wryted, 
In ffrensh also, and fayre endyted,^ 

and declares himself bound to foUow it closely: 

Thus seith myn auctour after whome I write. 
Blame not me : I moste endite 
As nye after hym as ever I may, 
Be it sothe or less I can not say.' 

However, in the midst of his protestations of faithfulness, he 
confesses to divergence: 

There-fore y do alle my myghthhe 
To saue my autor ynne sucche wyse 
As he that mater luste devyse, 
Where he makyth grete compleynte 
In french so fayre thatt yt to pajTite 
In Englysche tunngge y saye for me 
My wyttys alle to dullet bee. 
He telleth hys tale of sentament 
I vnderstonde noghth hys entent, 
Ne woUe ne besy me to lere.* 

He owns to the abbreviation of descriptive passages, which 
so many English translators had perpetrated in silence: 

Her bewte dyscry fajrae wolde I 
Affter the sentence off myne auctowre, 

1 See 11. 6581 fif. ^ Ed. E. E. T. S., 11. 500-501. 

3 LI. 7742-6. « LI. 2340-8. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 3a 

Butte I pray yowe of thys grette labowre 
I mote at thys tyme excused be; ^ 

Butte who so luste to here of hur a-raye, 
Lette him go to the ffrensshe bocke, 
That Idell mater I forsoke 
To telle hyt in prose or els in ryme, 
For me thoghte hyt taryed grette tyme. 
And ys a mater full nedless.^ 

One cannot but suspect that this odd mingling of respect 
and freedom as regards the original describes the attitude of 
many other translators of romances, less articulate in the ex- 
pression of their theory. 

To deal fairly with many of the romances of this second 
group, one must consider the relationship between romance 
and history and the uncertain division between the two. 
The early chronicles of England generally devoted an ap- 
preciable space to matters of romance, the stories of Troy, 
of Aeneas, of Arthur. As in the case of the romance proper, 
such chronicles were, even in the modern sense, ''translated,'' 
for though the historian usually compiled his material from 
more than one source, his method was to put together long, 
consecutive passages from various authors, with little at- 
tempt at assimilating them into a whole. The distinction 
between history and romance was slow in arising. The 
Morte Arthur e offers within a few lines both "romances" 
and ''chronicles" as authorities for its statements.^ In 
Caxton's preface to Godfrey of BuUogne the enumeration of 
the great names of history includes Arthur and Charlemagne, 
and the story of Godfrey is designated as "this noble history 
which is no fable nor feigned thing." Throughout the 
period the stories of Troy and of Alexander are consistently 
treated as history, and their redactors frequently state that 
their material has come from various places. Nearly all 

» LI. 5144-8. 2 Li, 6170-6. 

3 Ed. E. E. T. S., 11. 3200, 3218. 



34 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

the English Troy stories are translations of Guido delle 
Colonne's Historia Trojana, and they take over from their 
original Guido's long discussion of authorities. The Alex- 
ander romances present the same effect of historical accu- 
racy in passages like the following : 

This passage destuted is 
In the French, well y-wis, 
Therefore I have, it to colour , 
Borrowed of the Latin author; ^ 

Of what kin he came can I nought find 
In no book that I bed when I began here 
The Latin to this language lelliche to turn.* 

The assumption of the historian's attitude was probably 
the largest factor in the development of the habit of expressing 
responsibility for following the source or for noting diver- 
gence from it. Less easy of explanation is the fact that com- 
ment on style so frequently appears in this connection. 
There is perhaps a touch of it even in Layamon's account of 
his originals, when he approaches his French source: ''Laya- 
mon began to journey wide over this land, and procured the 
noble books which he took for authority. He took the 
English book that Saint Bede made; another he took in 
Latin that Saint Albin made, and the fair Austin, who 
brought baptism hither; the third he took, (and) laid there 
in the midst, that a French clerk made, who was named 
Wace, who well could write. . . . Layamon laid before him 
these books, and turned the leaves . . . pen he took with 
fingers, and wrote on book skin, and the true words set to- 
gether, and the three books compressed into one." ^ Robert 
of Brunne, in his Chronicle of England, dated as early as 1338, 
combines a lengthy discussion of style with a clear statement 

1 King Alexander, ed. Weber, 1810, 11. 2199-2202. 

2 Alliterative romance of Alisaunder, E. E. T. S., 11. 456-9. 

3 Ed. Madden, 1847. 




THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 35 

of the extent to which he has used his sources. Wace tells 
in French 

All that the Latyn spelles, 
ffro Eneas till Cadwaladre; 
this Mayster Wace ther leves he. 
And ryght as Mayster Wace says, 
I telle myn Inglis the same ways.^ 

Pers of Langtoft continues the history; 

& as he says, than say I,^ 

writes the translator. Robert admires his predecessors, 
Dares, whose "Latyn is feyre to lere," Wace, who ''rymed 
it in Frankis fyne," and Pers, of whose style he says, ''feyrer 
language non ne redis"; but he is especially concerned with 
his own manner of expression. He does not aspire to an 
elaborate hterary style; rather, he says, 

I made it not forto be praysed, 
Bot at the lewed men were aysed.^ 

Consequently he eschews the difficult verse forms then 
coming into fashion, "ryme cowee," ''straungere," or ''en- 
terlace.'' He does not write for the ''disours," "seggers," 
and "harpours" of his own day, who tell the old stories 
badly. 

Non tham says as thai tham wrought, 
& in ther sayng it semes noght.^ 

A confusion of pronouns makes it difficult to understand 
what he considers the fault of contemporary renderings. 
Possibly it is that affectation of an obsolete style to which 
Caxton refers in the preface to the Eneydos. In any case, 
he himself rejects ''straunge Inglis" for "simple speche." 
Unlike Robert of Brunne, Andrew of Wyntoun, writing 

1 Ed. Furnivall, 1887, 11. 58-62. ^ l. 70. 

3 LI. 83-4. 4 LI. 95-6. 



36 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

at the beginning of the next century, deUghts in the orna- 
mental style which has added a charm to ancient story. 

Quharfore of sic antiquiteis 

Thei that set haly thare delite 

Gestis or storjds for to write, 

Flurist fairly thare purpose 

With quaynt and curiouse circumstance. 

For to raise hertis in plesance, 

And the heraris till excite 

Be wit or will to do thare delite.^ 

The ''antiquiteis" which he has in mind are obviously the 
tales of Troy. Guido delle Colonne, Homer, and Virgil, he 
continues, all 

Fairly formyt there tretyss, 

And curiously dytit there storyis.^ 

Some writers, however, did not adopt the elevated style which 
such subject matter deserves. 

Sum usit hot in plane maner 
Of air done dedis thar mater 
To writ, as did Dares of Frigy, 
That wrait of Troy all the story, 
Bot in till plane and opin style, 
But curiouse wordis or subtile.^ 

Andrew does not attempt to discuss the application of his 
theory to English style, but he has perhaps suggested the 
reason why the question of style counted for so much in 
connection with this pseudo-historical material. In the in- 
troduction to Barbour's Bruce, though the point at issue is 
not translation, there is a similar idea. According to 
Barbour, a true story has a special claim to an attractive 
rendering. 

Storyss to rede ar delitabill, 
Supposs that thai be nocht bot fabill; 

1 Original Chronicle, 11. 6-13. ^ n, i^yj^ 

3 LI. 18-23. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 37 

Than suld storyss that suthfast wer, 
And thai war said in gud maner, 
Have doubill plesance in heryng. 
The fyrst plesance is the carpyng, 
And the tothir the suthfastness, 
That schawys the thing rycht as it wes.^ 

Lydgate, Wyntoun's contemporary, apparently shared 
his views. In translating Boccaccio's Falls of Princes he 
dispenses with stylistic ornament. 

Of freshe colours I toke no maner hede. 
But my processe playnly for to lede: 
As me semed it was to me most mete 
To set apart Rethorykes swete.^ 

But when it came to the Troy story, his matter demanded a 
different treatment. He calls upon Mars 

To do socour my stile to directe, 
And of my penne the tracys to correcte, 
Whyche bareyn is of aureate licour, 
But in thi grace I fynde som favour 
For to conveye it wyth thyn influence.' 

He also asks aid of Calliope. 

Now of thy grace be helpyng unto me, 
And of thy golde dewe lat the lycour wete 
My dulled breast, that with thyn hony swete 
Sugrest tongis of rethoricyens. 
And maistresse art to musicyens.^ 

Like Wyntoun, Lydgate pays tribute to his predecessors, 
the clerks who have kept in memory the great deeds of the 
past 

. . . thorough diligent labour, 

And enlumyned with many corious flour 

Of rethorik, to make us comprehend 

The trouthe of al.^ 



1 Ed. E. E. T. S., 11. 1-7. 
3 Ed. E. E. T. S., 11. 29-33. 



2 Prologue. 
4 LI. 54-8. 



5 LI. 217-20. 



38 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Of Guido in particular he writes that he 

. . . had in writyng passynge excellence. 
For he enlumyneth by craft & cadence 
This noble story with many fresch colour 
Of rethorik, & many riche flom* 
Of eloquence to make it sownde bet 
He in the story hath ymped in and set, 
That in good fejrth I trowe he hath no pere.^ 

None of these men point out the relationship between the 
style of the original and the style to be employed in the 
Enghsh rendering. Caxton, the last writer to be considered 
in this connection, remarks in his preface to The Recuyell of 
the Histories of Troy on the ''fair language of the French, 
which was in prose so well and compendiously set and 
written," and in the prologue to the Eneydos tells how he 
was attracted by the ''fair and honest terms and words in 
French," and how, after writing a leaf or two, he noted that 
his Enghsh was characterized by "fair and strange terms." 
While it may be that both Caxton and Lydgate were trying 
to reproduce in Enghsh the pecuhar quahty of their originals, 
it is more probable that they beautified their own versions 
as best they could, without feeling it incumbent upon them 
to make their rhetorical devices correspond with those 
of their predecessors. Elsewhere Caxton expresses concern 
only for his own language, as it is to be judged by Enghsh 
readers without regard for the quahties of the French. In 
most cases he characterizes his renderings of romance as 
"simple and rude"; in the preface to Charles the Great he 
says that he uses "no gay terms, nor subtle, nor new elo- 
quence"; and in the preface to Blanchardyn and Eglantine 
he declares that he does not know "the art of rhetoric nor 
of such gay terms as now be said in these days and used," 
and that his only desire is to be understood by his readers. 

1 LI. 361-7. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 39 

The prologue to the Eneydos, however, tells a different story. 
According to this he has been blamed for expressing himself 
in, ''over curious terms which could not be understood of the 
common people" and requested to use "old and homely 
terms." But Caxton objects to the latter as being also 
unintelUgible. "In my judgment," he says, "the common 
terms that be daily used, are lighter to be understood than 
the old and ancient English." He is writing, not for the 
ignorant man, but "only for a clerk and a noble gentleman 
that feeleth and understandeth in feats of arms, in love, and 
in noble chivalry." For this reason, he concludes, "in a 
mean have I reduced and translated this said book into our 
English, not over rude nor curious, but in such terms as shall 
be understood, by God's grace, according to the copy." 
Though Caxton does not avail himself of Wyntoun's theory 
that the Troy story must be told in "curious and subtle" 
words, it is probable that, Uke other translators of his century, 
he felt the attraction of the new aureate diction while h^ 
professed the simplicity of language which existing standards 
demanded of the translator. 

Turning from the romance and the history and considering 
religious writings, the second large group of medieval pro- 
ductions, one finds the most significant translator's comment 
associated with the saint's legend, though occasionally the 
short pious tale or the more abstract theological treatise 
makes some contribution. These religious works differ 
from the romances in that they are more frequently based 
on Latin than on French originals, and in that they contain 
more deliberate and more repeated references to the audi- 
ences to which they have been adapted. The translator 
does not, like Caxton, write for "a clerk and a noble 
gentleman"; instead he explains repeatedly that he has 
striven to make his work understandable to the unlearned, 
for, as the author of The Child of Bristow pertinently 
remarks, 



40 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

The beste song that ever was made 
Is not worth a lekys blade 
But men wol tende ther-tille.^ 

Since Latin enditing is ''cumbrous," the translator of The 
Blood at Hayles presents a version in English, ''for plainly 
this the truth will tell"; ^ Osbern Bokenam will speak and 
write "plainly, after the language of Southfolk speech";^ 
John Capgrave, finding that the earlier translator of the life 
of St. Katherine has made the work "full hard . . . right 
for the strangeness of his dark language," undertakes to 
translate it "more openly" and ''set it more plain." * This 
conception of the audience, together with the writer's con- 
sciousness that even in presenting narrative he is conveying 
spiritual truths of supreme importance to his readers, prob- 
ably increases the tendency of the translator to incorporate 
into his English version such running commentary as at 
intervals suggests itself to him. He may add a line or two 
of explanation, of exhortation, or, if he recognizes a quota- 
tion from the Scriptures or from the Fathers, he may supply 
the authority for it. John Capgrave undertakes to trans- 
late the life of St. Gilbert "right as I find before me, save 
some additions will I put thereto which men of that order 
have told me, and eke other things that shall fall to my mind 
in the writing which be pertinent to the matter." ^ Nicholas 
Love puts into English The Mirror of the Blessed Life of 
Jesus Christ, "with more put to in certain parts, and also 
with drawing out of divers authorities and matters as it 
seemeth to the writer hereof most speedful and edifying 
to them that be of simple understanding." ^ Such incidental 

1 In Altenglische Legenden, Neue Folge, 11. 7-9. 

2 Ibid., 11. 33, 35. 

3 Osbern Bokenam's Legenden, St. Agnes, 11. 29-30. 

^ St. Katherine oj Alexandria, Prologue, 11. 61-2, 232-3, 64. 
^ Lives of St. Augustine and St. Gilbert, Prologue. 
^ Oxford, Clarendon Press, Prohemium. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 41 

citation of authority is evident in St. Paula, published by 
Dr. Horstmann side by side with its Latin original.^ With 
more simphcity and less display of learning, the translator 
of religious works sometimes vaguely adduces authority, as 
did the translator of romances, in connection with an un- 
famihar name. One finds such statements as: ''Manna, so 
it is written"; ^ "Such a fiend, as the book tells us, is called 
Incubus";^ "In the country of Champagne, as the book 
tells"; ^ "Cursates, saith the book, he hight";^ 



Her body lyeth in strong castylle 

And Bulstene, seith the boke, it hight; ^ 

In the yer of ur lord of hevene 
Four hundred and eke ellevene 
Wandaly the province tok 
Of Aufrike — so seith the bok. "^ 

Often, however, the reference to source is introduced 
apparently at random. On the whole, indeed, the comment 
which accompanies religious writings does not differ es- 
sentially in intelligibility or significance from that associated 
with romances; its interest lies mainly in the fact that it 
brings into greater relief tendencies more or less apparent 
in the other form. 

One of these is the large proportion of borrowed comment. 
The constant citation of authority in a work such as, for 
example. The Golden Legend was likely to be reproduced in 
the English with varying degrees of faithfulness. A Life 
of St. Augustine, to choose a few illustrations from many, 
reproduces the Latin as in the following examples: "as the 

^ In Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden. 

2 Minor Poems of the Vernon MS., De Festo Corporis ChrisH, 1. 170. 

3 Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, St Bernard, II. 943-4. 
* Ibid., Erasmus, 1. 41. 

^ Altenglische Legenden, Neue Folge, St. Katherine, p. 243, 1. 451. 
® Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, Christine, 11. 489-90. 
7 Ibid., St. Augustine, 11. 1137-40. 



42 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

book telleth us" replaces ^'dicitur enim"; "of him it is said 
in Glosarie," ''ut dicitur in Glossario" ; "in the book of his 
confessions the sooth is written for the nonce," "ut legitur 
in Hbro iii. confessionum." ^ Robert of Brunne's Handlyng 
Synne, as printed by the Early Enghsh Text Society with its 
French original, affords numerous examples of translated 
references to authority. 

The tale ys wrytyn, al and sum, 
In a boke of Vitas Patnim 

corresponds with 

Car en vn liure ai trou6 
Qe Vitas Patrum est apele; 



with 



Thus seyth seynt Anselme, that hit wrote 
To thys clerkys that weyl hit wote 

Ceo nus ad Seint Ancelme dit 
Qe en la fey fut clerk parfit. 



Yet there are variations in the English much more marked 
than in the last example. "Cum I'estorie nus ad cunte" 
has become " Yn the byble men mow hyt se"; while for 

En ve liure qe est apelez 

La sume des vertuz & des pechiez 

the translator has substituted 

Thys same tale tellyth seynt Bede 
Yn hys gestys that men rede.^ 

This attempt to give the origin of a tale or of a precept more 
accurately than it is given in the French or the Latin leads 
sometimes to strange confusion, more especially when a 
reference to the Scriptures is involved. It was admitted 
that the Bible was unusually difficult of comprehension and 

1 Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, St. Augustine, 11. 43, 57-8, 128. 

2 LI. 169-70, 785-6, 2475-6. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 43 

that, if the simple were to understand it, it must be annotated 
in various ways. Nicholas Love says that there have been 
written ''for lewd men and women . . . devout meditations 
of Christ's Ufe more plain in certain parts than is expressed 
in the gospels of the four evangelists." ^ With so much ad- 
dition of commentary and legend, it was often hard to tell 
what was and what was not in Holy Scripture, and conse- 
quently while a narrative like The Birth of Jesus cites cor- 
rectly enough the gospels for certain days, of which it gives 
a free rendering,^ there are cases of amazing attributions, 
like that at the end of the legend of Ypotis: 

Seynt Jon the Evangelist 
Ede on eorthe with Jhesu Crist, 
This tale he wrot in latin 
In holi bok in parchemia.' 

After the fifteenth century is reached, the translator of re- 
ligious works, like the translator of romances, becomes more 
garrulous in his comment and develops a good deal of in- 
terest in English style. As a fair representative of the period 
we may take Osbern Bokenam, the translator of various 
saint's legends, a man very much interested in the con- 
temporary development of literary expression. Two quali- 
ties, according to Bokenam, characterize his own style; he 
writes "compendiously" and he avoids "gay speech." He 
repeatedly disclaims both prolixity and rhetorical ornament. 
His 

. . . form of procedyng artificyal 
Is in no wyse ner poetical.* 

He cannot emulate the "first rhetoricians," Gower, Chaucer, 
andLydgate; he comes too late; they have already gathered 

^ Op. dt., Prohemium. 

2 AUenglische Legenden, Gehurt Jesu, 11. 493, 527, 715, etc. 
^ Altenglische Legenden, Neue Folge, Ypotis, 11. 613-16. 
* Osbern Bokenani's Legenden, St. Margaret, 11. 84-5. 



44 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

"the most fresh flowers." Moreover the ornamental style 
would not become him; he does not desire 

... to have swych eloquence 
As sum curials han, ner swych asperence 
In utteryng of here subtyl conceytys 
In wych oft-tyme ful greth dysce3rt is.^ 

To covet the craft of such language would be ''great dotage '^ 
for an old man like him. Yet like those of Lydgate and 
Caxton, Bokenam's protestations are not entirely convincing, 
and in them one catches glimpses of a lurking fondness for 
the wordiness of fine writing. Though Pallas has always 
refused to lead him 

Of Thully Rethoryk in-to the motlyd mede, 
Flourys to gadryn of crafty eloquens,^ 

yet he has often prayed her to show him some favor. Else- 
where he finds it necessary to apologize for the brevity of 
part of his work. 

Now have I shewed more compendiously 
Than it owt have ben this noble pedigree; 
But in that myn auctour I follow sothly, 
And also to eschew prolixite, 
And for my wyt is schort, as ye may se, 
To the second part I wyl me hye.^ 

The conventionality, indeed, of Bokenam's phraseology and 
of his literary standards and the self-contradictory elements 
in his statements leave one with the impression that he has 
brought little, if anything, that is fresh and individual to 
add to the theory of translation. 

Whether or not the medieval period made progress towards 
the development of a more satisfactory theory is a doubtful 
question. While men like Lydgate, Bokenam, and Caxton 
generally profess to have reproduced the content of their 

1 Mary Magdalen, 11. 245-8. 2 ^t. Agnes, 11. 13-14. 

3 Op. ciL, St Anne, 11. 209-14. 



THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 45 

sources and make some mention of the original writers, their 
comment is confused and indefinite; they do not recognize 
any compelUng necessity for faithfulness; and one some- 
times suspects that they excelled their predecessors only in 
articulateness. As compared with Layamon and Orm they 
show a development scarcely worthy of a lapse of more than 
two centuries. There is perhaps, as time goes on, some 
httle advance towards the attainment of modern standards 
of scholarship as regards confession of divergence from 
sources. In the early part of the period variations from the 
original are only vaguely implied and become evident only 
when the reader can place the English beside the French or 
Latin. In Floris and Blancheflor, for example, a much 
condensed version of a descriptive passage in the French is 
introduced by the words, ''I ne can tell you how richly the 
saddle was wrought." ^ The romance of Arthur ends with 
the statement, 

He that will more look, 
Read in the French book, 
And he shall find there 
Things that I leete here.^ 

The Northern Passion turns from the legendary history of 
the Cross to something more nearly resembling the gospel 
narrative with the exhortation, '' Forget not Jesus for this 
tale." ^ As compared with this, writers like Nicholas Love 
or John Capgrave are noticeably explicit. Love pauses at 
various points to explain that he is omitting large sections 
of the original;^ Capgrave calls attention to his interpola- 
tions and refers them to their sources.^ On the other hand, 
there are constant implications that variation from source 
may be a desirable thing and that explanation and apology 

1 E. E. T. S., 1. 382. 2 E. E. T. S., 11. 633-6. 

3 E. E. T. S., p. 146, 1. 1. 4 Op. cit, pp. 100, 115, 300. 

5 Life of St. Gilbert, pp. 103, 135, 141. 



46 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

are unnecessary. Bokenam, for example, apologizes rather 
because The Golden Legend does not supply enough material 
and he must leave out certain things "for ignorance." ^ 
Caxton says of his Charles the Great, "If I had been more 
largely informed ... I had better made it." ^ 

On the whole, the greatest merit of the later medieval 
translators consists in the quantity of their comment. In 
spite of the vagueness and the absence of originaUty in their 
utterances, there is an advantage in their very garruUty. 
Translators needed to become more conscious and more 
deUberate in their work; different methods needed to be 
defined; and the habit of technical discussion had its value, 
even though the quaUty of the commentary was not par- 
ticularly good. Apart from a few conventional formulas, 
this habit of comment constituted the bequest of medieval 
translators to their sixteenth-century successors. 

1 Op. city St. Katherine, 1. 49. ^ Preface. 



II. THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 



I 



II 

THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 

The English Bible took its shape under unusual conditions, 
which had their share in the excellence of the final result. 
Appealing, as it did, to all classes, from the scholar, alert 
for controversial detail, to the unlearned layman, concerned 
only for his soul's welfare, it had its growth in the vital 
atmosphere of strong intellectual and spiritual activity. It 
was not enough that it should bear the test of the scholar's 
criticism; it must also reach the understanding of Tyndale's 
''boy that driveth the plough," demands difficult of satis- 
faction, but conducive theoretically to a fine development 
of the art of translation. To attain scholarly accuracy 
combined with practical intelligibility was, then, the task of 
the translator. 

From both angles criticism reached him. Tyndale refers 
to ''my translation in which they afiirm unto the lay people 
(as I have heard say) to be I wot not how many thousand 
heresies," and continues, "For they which in times past 
were wont to look on no more scripture than they found in 
their duns or such like devilish doctrine, have yet now so 
narrowly looked on my translation that there is not so much 
as one I therein if it lack a tittle over his head, but they have 
noted it, and number it unto the ignorant people for an 
heresy." ^ Tunstall's famous reference in his sermon at 
Paul's Cross to the two thousand errors in Tyndale's Testa- 
ment suggests the undiscriminating criticism, addressed to 
the popular ear and basing its appeal largely on "numbering," 

^ Preface to Genesis, in Pollard, Records of the English Bible, p. 94. 

49 



50 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

of which Tyndale complains. The prohibition of ''open 
reasoning in your open Taverns and Alehouses" ^ concerning 
the meaning of Scripture, included in the draft of the procla- 
mation for the reading of the Great Bible, also implies that 
there must have been enough of popular oral discussion to 
count for something in the shaping of the English Bible. 
Of the serious conament of more competent judges many 
records remain, enough to make it clear that, although the 
real technical problems involved were often obscured by 
controversy and by the common view that the divine quality 
of the original made human effort negligible, nevertheless 
the translator did not lack the stimulus which comes from 
intelligent criticism and discussion. 

The Bible also had an advantage over other translations 
in that the idea of progress towards an accurate version 
early arose. Unlike the translators of secular works, who 
frequently boast of the speed with which they have ac- 
complished their tasks, the translators of the Bible con- 
stantly mention the long, careful labor which has gone to 
their undertaking. Tyndale feels in his own work the need 
for revision, and so far as opportunity serves, corrects and 
polishes his version. Later translators consciously based 
their renderings on those of their predecessors. St. Augus- 
tine's approval of diversity of translations was cited again 
and again. Tyndale urges ''those that are better seen in 
the tongues than I" to "put to their hands to amend" 
any faults they may find in his work.^ George Joye, his 
assistant, later his would-be rival, declares that we must 
learn "to depend not whole on any man's translation. " ^ 
"Every one," says Coverdale, "doth his best to be nighest 
to the mark. And though they cannot all attain thereto 
yet shooteth one nigher than another"; ^ and again, "Sure 
I am that there cometh more knowledge and understanding 

1 Pollard, p. 266. « lUd., p. 112. 

3 lUd., p. 187. * lUd., p. 205. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 51 

of the scripture by their sundry translations than by all 
our sophistical doctors. For that one translateth something 
obscurely in one place, the same translateth another, or else 
he himself, more manifestly by a more plain vocable." ^ 
Occasionally the number of experimenters awakened some 
doubts; Cromwell suggests that the bishops make a "perfect 
correction "; 2 the patent granted him for the printing of 
the Bible advocates one translation since "the frailty of men 
is such that the diversity thereof may breed and bring forth 
manyf old inconveniences as when wilful and heady folks 
shall confer upon the diversity of the said translations";^ 
the translators of the version of 1611 have to "answer a 
third cavil . . . against us, for altering and amending our 
translations so oft";^ but the conception of progress was 
generally accepted, and finds fit expression in the preface 
to the Authorized Version: "Yet for all that, as nothing is 
begun and perfected at the same time, and the later thoughts 
are thought to be wiser: so, if we building on their founda- 
tion that went before us, and being holpen by their labors, 
do endeavor to make that better which they left so good; 
no man, we are sure, hath cause to mislike us." ^ 

But the English translators had more far-reaching op- 
portunities to profit by the experiences of others. In other 
countries than England men were engaged in similar labors. 
The sixteenth century was rich in new Latin versions of the 
Scriptures. The translations of Erasmus, Beza, Pagninus, 
Miinster, Etienne, Montanus, and Tremellius had in turn 
their influence on the Enghsh renderings, and Castaho's 
translation into Ciceronian Latin had at least its share of 
discussion. There was constant intercourse between those 
interested in Bible translation in England and on the Con- 
tinent. English refugees during the persecutions fled across 
the Channel, and towns such as Worms, Zurich, Antwerp, 

1 Coverdale, Prologue to Bible of 1535. ^ Pollard, p. 196. 

3 lud., p. 259. 4 Ihid., p. 365. ^ jud., p. 360. 



52 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

and Geneva saw the first printing of most of the early Enghsh 
versions of the Scriptures. The Great Bible was set up in 
Paris. Indeed foreign printers had so large a share in the 
English Bible that it seemed sometimes advisable to limit 
their influence. Richard Grafton writes ironically to Crom- 
well regarding the text of the Bible: "Yea and to make it 
yet truer than it is, therefore Dutchmen dwelling within this 
realm go about the printing of it, which can neither speak 
good Enghsh, nor yet write none, and they will be both the 
printers and correctors thereof";^ and Coverdale and Grafton 
imply a similar fear in the case of Regnault, the Frenchman, 
who has been printing service books, when they ask Cromwell 
that "henceforth he print no more in the English tongue, 
unless he have an Englishman that is learned to be his cor- 
rector." 2 Moreover, versions of the Scriptures in other 
languages than English were not unknown in England. In 
1530 Henry the Eighth was led to prohibit "the having of 
holy scripture, translated into the vulgar tongues of Enghsh, 
French, or Dutch.^' ^ Besides this general familiarity with 
foreign translations and foreign printers, a more specific 
indebtedness must be recognized. More's attack on the 
book "which whoso calleth the New Testament calleth it 
by a wrong name, except they will call it Tyndale's testament 
or Luther's testament"^ is in some degree justified in its 
reference to German influence. Coverdale acknowledges the 
aid he has received from "the Dutch interpreters: whom 
(because to their singular gifts and special diligence in the 
Bible) I have been the more glad to follow." ^' The preface 
to the version of 1611 says, "Neither did we think much to 
consult the translators or commentators, Chaldee, Hebrew, 
Syrian, Greek, or Latin, no, nor the Spanish, French, Italian, 
or Dutch.' ^ ^ Doubtless a great part of the debt lay in 
matters of exegesis, but in his familiarity with so great a 
1 Pollard, p. 220. ^ 75^^.^ p, 239. » 75^^^.^ p. 163, 

* Ibid., p. 126. 5 Ibid., p. 203. ^ Ibid., p. 371. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 53 

number of translations into other languages and with the 
discussion centering around these translations, it is impossi- 
ble that the English translator should have failed to obtain 
suggestions, both practical and theoretical, which applied to 
translation rather than to interpretation. Comments on 
the general aims and methods of translation, happy turns of 
expression in French or German which had their equivalents 
in English idiom, must frequently have illuminated his dif- 
ficulties. The translators of the Geneva Bible show a just 
realization of the truth when they speak of 'Hhe great op- 
portunity and occasions which God hath presented unto us 
in this Church, by reason of so many godly and learned men; 
and such diversities of translations in divers tongues." ^ 

Of the general history of Biblical translations, already so 
frequently and so adequately treated, only the barest outline 
is here necessary. The various Anglo-Saxon translations 
and the WycUffite versions are largely detached from the. 
main line of development. From Tyndale's translations to 
the Authorized Version of 1611 the line is surprisingly con- 
secutive, though in the matter of theory an early translator 
occasionally anticipates views which obtain general accept- 
ance only after a long period of experiment and discussion. 
Roughly speaking, the theory of translation has as its two 
extremes, the Roman Catholic and the Puritan positions, 
while the 1611 version, where its preface commits itself, 
compromises on the points at issue. 

As is to be expected, the most definite statements of the 
problems involved and of their solution are usually found in 
the comment of those practically engaged in the work of 
translation. The widely discussed question whether or not 
the people should have the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue 
scarcely ever comes down to the difficulties and possibili- 
ties of the actual undertaking. More's lengthy attack on 
Tyndale's New Testament is chiefly concerned with matters 
1 Pollard, p. 280. 



54 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

of doctrine. Apart from the prefaces to the various issues 
of the Bible, the most elaborate discussion of technical mat- 
ters is Fulke's Defence of the Sincere and True Translation of 
the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue, a Protestant 
reply to the claims of the Rhemish translators, published in 
1589. Even the more definite comments are bound up with 
a great mass of controversial or hortatory material, so that 
it is hard to disentangle the actual contribution which is 
being made to the theory of translation. Sometimes the 
translator settled vexed questions by using marginal glosses, 
a method which might make for accuracy but was hable to 
become cumbrous and confusing. Like the prefaces, the 
glosses sometimes contained theological rather than linguistic 
comment, thus proving a special source of controversy. A 
proclamation of Henry the Eighth forbids the printing or 
importation of "any books of divine scripture in the EngUsh 
tongue, with any additions in the margin or any pro- 
logue . . . except the same be first viewed, examined, and 
allowed by the king's highness, or such of his majesty's 
council, or others, as it shall please his grace to assign 
thereto, but only the plain sentence and text." ^ The 
version of 1611 admitted only linguistic comment. 

Though the Anglo-Saxon renderings of the Scriptures are 
for the most part isolated from the main body of translations, 
there are some points of contact. Elizabethan translators 
frequently cited the example of the earher period as an argu- 
ment in favor of having the Bible in the vulgar tongue. Nor 
were they entirely unfamiliar with the work of these remote 
predecessors. Foxe, the martyrologist, pubhshed in 1571 an 
edition of the four gospels in Anglo-Saxon under the patronage 
of Archbishop Parker. Parker's well-known interest in Old 
EngHsh centered particularly around the early versions of 
the Scriptures. Secretary Cecil sends the Archbishop "a 
very ancient Bible written in Latin and old Enghsh or 
1 Pollard, p. 241. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 55 

Saxon," and Parker in reply comments on 'Hhe fair antique 
writing with the Saxon interpretation." ^ Moreover the 
shght record which survives suggests that the problems which 
confronted the Anglo-Saxon translator were not unlike those 
which met the translator of a later period. Aelfric's theory 
of translation in general is expressed in the Latin prefaces 
to the Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church and the Lives of 
the Saints. Above all things he desires that his work may 
be clear and readable. Hence he has a peculiar regard for 
brevity. The Homilies are rendered "non garrula ver- 
bositate"; the Lives of the Saints are abbreviated on the 
principle that ''non semper breuitas sermonem deturpat sed 
multotiens honestiorem reddit." Clear, idiomatic English 
is essential even when it demands the sacrifice of verbal ac- 
curacy. He presents not word for word but sense for sense, 
and prefers the "pure and open words of the language of this 
people," to a more artificial style. His Anglo-Saxon Preface 
to Genesis implies that he felt the need of greater faithfulness 
in the case of the Bible: ''We dare write no more in English 
than the Latin has, nor change the orders (endebirdnisse) " ; 
but it goes on to say that it is necessary that Latin idiom 
adapt itself to English idiom.^ 

Apart from Aelfric's prefaces Anglo-Saxon translators of 
the Scriptures have left no comment on their methods. 
One of the versions of the Gospels, however, links itself with 
later translations by employing as preface three of St. 
Jerome's prologues, among them the Preface to Eusehius. 
References to Jerome's and Augustine's theories of transla- 
tion are frequent throughout the course of Biblical transla- 
tion but are generally vague. The Preface to Eusehius and 
the Epistle to Pammachius contain the most complete state- 
ments of the principles which guided Jerome. Both em- 
phasize the necessity of giving sense for sense rather than 

^ Strype, Life of Parker, London, 1711, p. 536. 

2 For a further account of Aelfric's theories, see Chapter I. 



56 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

word for word, '^except," says the latter, '4n the case of the 
Holy Scriptures where even the order of the words is a 
mystery." This corresponds closely with Aelfric's theory 
expressed in the preface to the Lives of the Saints: ''Nee 
potuimus in ista translatione semper verbum ex verbo 
transferre, sed tamen sensum ex sensu," and his insist ance 
in the Preface to Genesis on a faithfulness which extends even 
to the endebirdnisse or orders. 

The principle ''word for word if possible; if not, sense for 
sense" is common in connection with medieval translations, 
but is susceptible of very different interpretations, as ap- 
pears sometimes from its context. Richard Rolle's phrasing 
of the theory in the preface to his translation of the Psalter is : 
"I follow the letter as much as I may. And where I find no 
proper English I follow the wit of the words"; but he also 
makes the contradictory statement, "In this work I seek no 
strange English, but lightest and commonest, and such that 
is most like to the Latin, ''^ ^ a pecuhar conception of the 
translator's obligation to his own tongue! The Prologue 
to the second recension of the Wycliffite version, commonly 
attributed to Purvey, emphasizes, under cover of the same 
apparent theory, the claims of the vernacular. "The 
best translating," it runs, "is out of Latin into Enghsh, to 
translate after the sentence, and not only after the words, 
so that the sentence be as open, either opener, in English as 
in Latin, . . . and if the letter may not be sued in the trans- 
lating, let the sentence be ever whole and open, for the words 
owe to serve to the intent and sentence." ^ The growing 
distrust of the Vulgate in some quarters probably accounts 
in some measure for the translator's attempt to make the 
meaning if necessary "more true and more open than it is in 
the Latin." In any case these contrasted theories represent 

^ The Psalter translated hy Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. Bramley, 
Oxford, 1884. 

^ Chapter 15, in Pollard, Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 57 

roughly the position of the Roman Cathohc and, to some 
extent, the AngHcan party as compared with the more dis- 
tinctly Protestant attitude throughout the period when the 
English Bible was taking shape, the former stressing the 
difficulties of translation and consequently discouraging it, 
or, when permitting it, insisting on extreme faithfulness to the 
original; the latter profiting by experiment and criticism 
and steadily working towards a version which would give 
due heed not only to the claims of the original but to the 
genius of the English language. 

Regarded merely as theory, however, a statement like the 
one just quoted obviously failed to give adequate recognition 
to what the original might justly demand, and in that re- 
spect justified the fears of those who opposed translation. 
The high standard of accuracy set by such critics demanded of 
the translator an increasing consciousness of the difficulties 
involved and an increasingly clear conception of what things 
were and were not permissible. Purvey himself contributes 
to this end by a definite statement of certain changes which 
may be allowed the English writer.^ Ablative absolute or 
participial constructions may be replaced by clauses of various 
kinds, ''and this will, in many places, make the sentence 
open, where to English it after the word would be dark and 
doubtful. Also," he continues, "a relative, which, may be 
resolved into his antecedent with a conjunction copulative, 
as thus, which runneth, and he runneth. Also when a word 
is once set in a reason, it may be set forth as oft as it is under- 
stood, either as oft as reason and need ask; and this word 
autem either vero, may stand for forsooth either for hut, and 
thus I use commonly; and sometimes it may stand for and, 
as old grammarians say. Also when rightful construction is 
letted by relation, I resolve it openly, thus, where this reason, 
Dominum formidahunt adversarii ejus, should be Englished 
thus by the letter, the Lord his adversaries shall dread, I 
1 Prologue, Chapter 15. 



58 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

English it thus by resolution, the adversaries of the Lord shall 
dread him; and so of other reasons that be like." In the 
later period of Biblical translation, when grammatical in- 
formation was more accessible, such elementary comment 
was not likely to be committed to print, but echoes of similar 
technical difficulties are occasionally heard. T3rndale, speak- 
ing of the Hebraisms in the Greek Testament, asks his 
critics to ''consider the Hebrew phrase . . . whose preter- 
perfect tense and present tense is both one, and the future 
tense is the optative mood also, and the future tense is oft 
the imperative mood in the active voice and in the passive 
voice. Likewise person for person, number for number, 
and interrogation for a conditional, and such like is with the 
Hebrews a common usage." ^ The men concerned in the 
preparation of the Bishops' Bible discuss the rendering of 
tenses in the Psalms. At the beginning of the first Psalm 
the Bishop of Rochester turns ''the preterperfect tense into 
the present tense; because the sense is too harsh in the pre- 
terperfect tense," and the Bishop of Ely advises "the trans- 
lation of the verbs in the Psalms to be used uniformly in one 
tense." ^ 

Purvey's explanations, however, suggest that his mind is 
occupied, not merely with details, but with a somewhat 
larger problem. Medieval translators were frequently dis- 
turbed by the fact that it was almost impossible to confine 
an English version to the same number of words as the Latin. 
When they added to the number, they feared that they were 
unfaithful to the original. The need for brevity, for avoid- 
ing superfluous words, is especially emphasized in connection 
with the Bible. Conciseness, necessary for accuracy, is also 
an admirable quality in itself. Aelfric's approval of this 
characteristic has already been noted. The metrical preface 
to RoUe's Psalter reads: "This holy man in expounding, 

1 Prologue to the New Testament, printed in Matthew's Bible, 1551. 

2 Strype, Life of Parker, p. 208. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 59 

he followeth holy doctors, and in all his Englishing right after 
the Latin taketh course, and makes it compendious, short, 
good, and profitable." Purvey says, "Men might expound 
much openlier and shortUer the Bible than the old doctors 
have expounded it in Latin." Besides approving the avoid- 
ance of verbose conmientary and exposition, critics and 
translators are always on their guard against the employment 
of over many words ifi translation. Tyndale, in his revision, 
will "seek to bring to compendiousness that which is now 
translated at the length." ^ In certain cases, he says, 
English reproduces the Hebrew original more easily than 
does the Latin, because in Latin the translator must "seek 
a compass." ^ Coverdale finds a corresponding difficulty in 
turning Latin into English: "The figure called EcHpsis 
divers times used in the scriptures . . . though she do garn- 
ish the sentence in Latin will not so be admitted in other 
tongues." 3 The translator of the Geneva New Testament 
refers to the "Hebrew and Greek phrases, which are strange 
to render into other tongues, and also shortJ^ ^ The preface 
to the Rhemish Testament accuses the Protestant translators 
of having in one place put into the text "three words more 
. . . than the Greek word doth signify." ^ Strype says of 
Cheke in a passage chiefly concerned with Cheke's attempt 
at translation of the Bible, "He brought in a short and ex- 
pressive way of writing without long and intricate periods," ^ 
a comment which suggests that possibly the appreciation of 
conciseness embraced sentence structure as well as phrasing. 
As Tyndale suggests, careful revision made for brevity. In 
Laurence's scheme for correcting his part of the Bishop's 
Bible was the heading "words superfluous";^ the preface 

1 Pollard, p. 116. 

2 Preface to The Obedience of a Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises, 
Parker Society, 1848, p. 390. ^ PoUard, p. 211. 

* Ibid., p. 277. 5 ibid,^ p. 306. 

« Life of Cheke, p. 212. ^ Strype, Life of Parker, p. 404. 



60 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

to the Authorized Version says, ''If anything be halting, or 
superfluous, or not so agreeable to the original, the same may 
be corrected, and the truth set in place." ^ As time went on, 
certain technical means were employed to meet the situation. 
Coverdale incloses in brackets words not in the Latin text; 
the Geneva translators put added words in italics; Fulke 
criticizes the Rhemish translators for neglecting this device; ^ 
and the matter is finally settled by its employment in the 
Authorized Version. Fulke, however, irritated by what he 
considers a superstitious regard for the number of words in 
the original on the part of the Rhemish translators, puts the 
whole question on a common-sense basis. He charges his 
opponents with making ''many imperfect sentences . . . 
because you will not seem to add that which in translation 
is no addition, but a true translation." ^ "For to translate 
out of one tongue into another," he says in another place, 
"is a matter of greater difficulty than is commonly taken, I 
mean exactly to yield as much and no more than the original 
containeth, when the words and phrases are so different, 
that few are found which in all points signify the same thing, 
neither more nor less, in divers tongues." * And again, 
"Must not such particles in translation be always expressed 
to make the sense plain, which in English without the particle 
hath no sense or understanding. To translate precisely out 
of the Hebrew is not to observe the number of words, but 
the perfect sense and meaning, as the phrase of our tongue 
will serve to be understood." ^ 

For the distinguishing characteristics of the Authorized 
Version, the beauty of its rhythm, the vigor of its native 
Saxon vocabulary, there is little to prepare one in the com- 
ment of its translators or their predecessors. Apparently 
the faithful effort to render the original truly resulted in a 
perfection of style of which the translator himself was largely 

1 Pollard, p. 361. 2 Fulke, Defence, Parker Society, p. 552. 

3 Defence, p. 552. ^ 75^^^,^ p^ 97, 5 jud., p. 408. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 61 

unconscious. The declaration in the preface to the version 
of 1611 that ^'niceness in words was always counted the next 
step to trifling/' ^ and the gen'^^^al condemnation of Castalio's 
'4ewd translation/' ^ point to a respect for the original 
which made the translator merely a mouthpiece and the 
English language merely a medium for a divine utterance. 
Possibly there is to be found in appreciation of the style of 
the original Hebrew,' Greek, or Latin some hint of what 
gave the English version its peculiar beauty, though even 
here it is hard to distinguish the tribute paid to style from 
that paid to content. The characterization may be only a 
bit of vague comparison like that in the preface to the 
Authorized Version, ''Hebrew the ancientest, . . . Greek 
the most copious, . . . Latin the finest," ^ or the reference 
in the preface to the Rhemish New Testament to the Vulgate 
as the translation ''of greatest majesty." ^ The prefaces to 
the Geneva New Testament and the Geneva Bible combine 
fairly definite linguistic comment with less obvious references 
to style: "And because the Hebrew and Greek phrases, 
which are hard to render in other tongues, and also short, 
should not be so hard, I have sometimes interpreted them 
without any whit diminishing the grace of the sense, as our 
language doth use them";^ "Now as we have chiefly ob- 
served the sense, and labored always to restore it to all in- 
tegrity, so have we most reverently kept the propriety of 
the words, considering that the Apostles who spoke and wrote 
to the Gentiles in the Greek tongue, rather constrained them 
to the lively phrase of the Hebrew, than enterprised far by 
mollifying their language to speak as the Gentiles did. 
And for this and other causes we have in many places re- 
served the Hebrew phrases, notwithstanding that they 
may seem somewhat hard in their ears that are not well 
practised and also delight in the sweet sounding phrases of 

1 Pollard, p. 375. 2 E.g., Fulke, Defence, p. 163. 

3 Pollard, p. 349. ^ jj^i^^^^ p, 303. ^ Ibid., p. 277. 



62 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

the holy Scriptures."^ On the other hand the Rhemish 
translators defend the retention of these Hebrew phrases 
on the ground of stylistic beauty : " There is a certain majesty 
and more signification in these speeches, and therefore both 
Greek and Latin keep them, although it is no more the Greek 
or Latin phrase, than it is the Enghsh." ^ of peculiar in- 
terest is Tyndale's estimate of the relative possibihties of 
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English. Of the Bible he writes : 
"They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it 
is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the 
Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the 
Latin. And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth 
a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. 
The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand 
places thou needest not but to translate it into the Enghsh 
word for word; when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, 
and yet shalt have much work to translate it well-favoredly, 
so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure 
understanding with it in the Latin, and as it hath in the 
Hebrew." ^ The imphcation that the English version might 
possess the ''grace and sweetness" of the Hebrew original 
suggests that Tyndale was not entirely unconscious of the 
charm which his own work possessed, and which it was to 
transmit to later renderings. 

The questions most definitely discussed by those concerned 
in the translation of the Bible were questions of vocabulary. 
Primarily most of these discussions centered around points of 
doctrine and were concerned as largely with the meaning of 
the word in the original as with its connotation in EngUsh. 
Yet though not in their first intention linguistic, these dis- 
cussions of necessity had their bearing on the general problems 
debated by rhetoricians of the day and occasionally resulted 

1 Pollard, p. 281. 2 75^,^ p. 309. 

' Preface to The Obedience of a Christian Man, Doctrinal Treatises, 
pp. 148-9. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 63 

in definite comment on English usage, as when, for example. 
More says: "And in our English tongue this word senior 
signifieth nothing at all, but is a French word used in English 
more than half in mockage, when one will call another my 
lord in scorn." With the exception of Sir John Cheke few 
of the translators say anything which can be construed as 
advocacy of the employment of native EngUsh words. Of 
Cheke's attitude there can, of course, be no doubt. His 
theorj^ is thus described by Strype: "And moreover, in 
writing any discourse, he would allow no words, but such 
as were pure English, or of Saxon original; suffering no 
adoption of any foreign word into the Enghsh speech, which 
he thought was copious enough of itself, without borrowing 
words of other countries. Thus in his own translations into 
English, he would not use any but pure English phrase and 
expression, which indeed made his style here and there a 
little affected and hard: and forced him to use sometimes 
odd and uncouth words." ^ His Bibhcal translation was a 
conscious attempt at carrying out these ideas. "Upon this 
account," writes Strype, "Cheke seemed to dislike the 
English translation of the Bible, because in it there were so 
many foreign words. Which made him once attempt a new 
translation of the New Testament, and he completed the 
gospel of St. Matthew. And made an entrance into St. 
Mark; wherein all along he labored to use only true Anglo- 
Saxon words." ^ Since Cheke's translation remained in 
manuscript till long after the EUzabethan period, its influence 
was probably not far-reaching, but his uncompromising 
views must have had their effect on his contemporaries. 
Taverner's Bible, a less extreme example of the same ten- 
dency, seemingly had no influence on later renderings.^ 

1 Ufe of Cheke, p. 212. 2 ji^i^,^ p. 212. 

^ An interesting comment of later date than the Authorized Version 
is found in the preface to William LTsle's Divers Ancient Monuments of 
the Saxon Tongue, published in 1638. L'Isle writes: "These monu- 



64 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Regarding the value of synonjniis there is considerable 
comment, the prevailing tendency of which is not favorable 
to unnecessary discrimination between pairs of words. This 
seems to be the attitude of Coverdale in two somewhat con- 
fused passages in which he attempts to consider at the same 
time the signification of the original word, the practice of 
other translators, and the facts of English usage. Defend- 
ing diversities of translations, he says, ''For that one 
interpreteth something obscurely in one place, the same 
translateth another, or else he himself, more manifestly by a 
more plain vocable of the same meaning in another place." ^ 
As illustrations Coverdale mentions scribe and lawyer; 
elders, and father and mother; repentance, penance, and 
amendment; and continues: "And in this manner have I 
used in my translation, calling it in one place penance that 
in another place I call repentance; and that not only because 
the interpreters have done so before me, but that the ad- 
versaries of the truth may see, how that we abhor not this 
word penance as they untruly report of us, no more than the 
interpreters of Latin abhor poenitare, when they read re- 
scipiscere." In the preface to the Latin-English Testament 
of 1535 he says: ''And though I seem to be all too scrupulous 
calling it in one place penance, that in another I call re- 
pentance: and gelded that another calleth chaste, this 
methinks ought not to offend the saying that the holy ghost 
(I trust) is the author of both our doings . . . and therefore 
I heartily require thee think no more harm in me for calling 

ments of reverend antiquity, I mean the Saxon Bibles, to him that mider- 
standingly reads and well considers the time wherein they were written, 
will in many places convince of affected obscurity some late transla- 
tions." After criticizing the inkhorn terms of the Rhemish transla- 
tors, he says, "The Saxon hath words for Trinity, Unity, and all such 
foreign words as we are now fain to use, because we have forgot better 
of our own." (In J. L. Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views on the Cfrowth, 
Status, and Destiny of the English Language.) 
1 Prologue to Bible of 1535. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 65 

it in one place penance that in another I call repentance, 
than I think harm in hun that calleth it chaste, which by 
the nature of this word Eunuchus I call gelded . . . And for 
my part I ensure thee I am indifferent to call it as well with 
one term as with the other, so long as I know that it is 
no prejudice nor injury to the meaning of the holy ghost." ^ 
Fulke in his answer to Gregory Martin shows the same tend- 
ency to ignore differences in meaning. Martin says: ''Note 
also that they put the word 'just,' when faith is joined withal,, 
as Rom. i, 'the just shall live by faith,' to signify that justi- 
fication is by faith. But if works be joined withal and keep- 
ing the commandments, as in the place alleged, Luke i, there 
they say 'righteous' to suppose justification by works." 
Fulke replies: "This is a marvellous difference, never heard 
of (I think) in the English tongue before, between 'just' and 
'righteous,' 'justice' and 'righteousness.' I am sure there 
is none of our translators, no, nor any professor of justifica- 
tion by faith only, that esteemeth it the worth of one hair, 
whether you say in any place of scripture 'just' or 'righteous,' 
'justice' or 'righteousness'; and therefore freely have they 
used sometimes the one word, sometimes the other. . . . 
Certain it is that no Englishman knoweth the difference be- 
tween 'just' and 'righteous,' 'unjust' and 'unrighteous,' sav- 
ing that ' righteousness ' and ' righteous ' are the more familiar 
English words." ^ Martin and Fulke differ in the same way 
over the use of the words "deeds" and "works." The 
question whether the same English word should always be 
used to represent the same word in the original was frequently 
a matter of discussion. It was probably in the mind of the 
Archbishop of Ely when he wrote to Archbishop Parker, 
"And if ye translate bonitas or misericordiam, to use it 
likewise in all places of the Psalms." ^ The surprising 
amount of space devoted by the preface to the version of 

1 Pollard, p. 212. 2 puikg, pp. 337-8. 

3 Pollard, p. 291. 



66 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

1611 to explaining the usage followed by the translators 
gives some idea of the importance attaching to the matter. 
^'We have not tied ourselves," they say, ''to an uniformity 
of phrasing, or to an identity of words, as some peradventure 
would wish that we had done, because they observe, that 
some learned men somewhere, have been as exact as they 
could that way. Truly, that we might not vary from the 
sense of that which we had translated before, if the word 
signified the same in both places (for there be some words 
that be not of the same sense everywhere) we were especially 
careful, and made a conscience, according to our duty. But 
that we should express the same notion in the same particular 
word; as for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greek 
word once by Purpose, never to call it Intent; if one where 
Journeying, never Travelling; if one where Think, never 
Suppose; if one where Pain, never Ache; if one where Joy, 
never Gladness, etc. Thus to mince the matter, we thought 
to savor more of curiosity than wisdom. . . . For is the 
kingdom of God become words or syllables? why should we 
be in bondage to them if we may be free, use one precisely 
when we may use another no less fit, as commodiously ? " ^ 

It was seldom, however, that the translator felt free to 
interchange words indiscriminately. Of his treatment of 
the original Purvey writes: ''But in translating of words 
equivocal, that is, that hath many significations under one 
letter, may lightly be peril, for Austin saith in the 2nd. book 
of Christian Teaching, that if equivocal words be not trans- 
lated into the sense, either understanding, of the author, it 
is error; as in that place of the Psalm, the feet of them he 
swift to shed out blood, the Greek word is equivocal to sharp 
and swift, and he that translated sharp feet erred, and a book 
that hath sharp feet is false, and must be amended; as that 
sentence unkind young trees shall not give deep roots oweth to 
be thus, the plantings of adultery shall not give deep roots. . . . 
1 Ibid., p. 374. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 67 

Therefore a translator hath great need to study well the 
sentence, both before and after, and look that such equivocal 
words accord with the sentence." ^ Consideration of the 
connotation of English words is required of the translators 
of the Bishops' Bible. " Item that all such words as soundeth 
in the Old Testament to any offence of lightness or obscenity 
be expressed with more convenient terms and phrases." ^ 
Generally, however, it was the theological connotation of 
words that was at issue, especially the question whether 
words were to be taken in their ecclesiastical or their profane 
sense, that is, whether certain words which through long 
association with the church had come to have a peculiar 
technical meaning should be represented in English by such 
words as the church habitually employed, generally words 
similar in form to the Latin. The question was a large one, 
and affected other languages than English. Foxe, for ex- 
ample, has difficulty in turning into Latin the controversy 
between Archbishop Cranmer and Gardiner, Bishop of 
Winchester. ''The English style also stuck with him; which 
having so many ecclesiastical phrases and manners of speech, 
no good Latin expressions could be found to answer them."^ 
In England trouble arose with the appearance of Tyndale's 
New Testament. More accused him of mistranslating 
"three words of great weight," ^ priests, church, and charity, 
for which he had substituted seniors, congregation, and love. 
Robert Ridley, chaplain to the Bishop of London, wrote of 
Tyndale's version: ''By this translation we shall lose all 
these Christian words, penance, charity, confession, grace, 
priest, church, which he always calleth a congregation. — 
Idolatria calleth he worshipping of images." ^ Much longer 
is the list of words presented to Convocation some years 
later by the Bishop of Winchester "which he desired for 

1 Prologue, Chapter 15. 2 Pollard, p. 298. 

3 Strype, Life of Grindal, Oxford, 1821, p. 19. 

' Pollard, p. 127. ' Ibid., p. 124. 



68 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

their germane and native meaning and for the majesty of 
their matter might be retained as far as possible in their 
own nature or be turned into EngHsh speech as closely as 
possible." ^ It goes so far as to include words like Pontifex, 
Ancilla, Lites, Egenus, Zizania. This theory was largely 
put into practice by the translators of the Rhemish New 
Testament, who say, ''We are very precise and religious in 
following our copy, the old vulgar approved Latin : not only 
in sense, which we hope we always do, but sometimes in the 
very words also and phrases," ^ and give as illustrations of 
their usage the retention of Corbana, Parasceve, Pasche, 
Azymes, and similar words. Between the two extreme 
positions represented by Tyndale on the one hand and the 
Rhemish translators on the other, is the attitude of Grindal, 
who thus advises Foxe in the case previously mentioned: 
''In all these matters, as also in most others, it will be safe 
to hold a middle course. My judgment is the same with 
regard to style. For neither is the ecclesiastical style to be 
fastidiously neglected, as it is by some, especially when the 
heads of controversies cannot sometimes be perspicuously 
explained without it, nor, on the other hand, is it to be so 
superstitiously followed as to prevent us sometimes from 
sprinkling it with the ornaments of language." ^ The 
Authorized Version, following its custom, approves the 
middle course: "We have on the one side avoided the 
scrupulosity of the Puritans, who leave the old Ecclesiastical 
words, and betake themselves to other, as when they put 
washing for Baptism, and Congregation instead of Church : 
as also on the other side we have shunned the obscurity of 
the Papists, in their Azimes, Tunike, Rational, Holocausts, 
Praepuce, Pasche, and a number of such like." * 

In the interval between Tyndale's translation and the 

1 Pollard, p. 274. 2 75^^.^ p. 305. 

3 Translated in Remains of Archbishop Grindal, Parker Society, 1843, 
p. 234. * Pollard, pp. 375-6. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 69 

appearance of the Authorized Version the two parties shifted 
their ground rather amusingly. More accuses Tyndale of 
taking Hberties with the prevaiHng EngUsh usage, especially 
when he substitutes congregation for church, and insists 
that the people understand by church what they ought to 
understand. ''This is true," he says, "of the usual significa- 
tion of these words- themselves in the English tongue, by 
the common custom of us English people, that either now do 
use these words in our language, or that have used before 
our days. And I say that this common custom and usage 
of speech is the only thing by which we know the right and 
proper signification of any word, in so much that if a word 
were taken out of Latin, French, or Spanish, and were for 
lack of understanding of the tongue from whence it came, 
used for another thing in English than it was in the former 
tongue: then signifieth it in England none other thing than 
as we use it and understand thereby, whatsoever it signify 
anywhere else. Then say I now that in England this word 
congregation did never signify the number of Christian 
people with a connotation or consideration of their faith or 
Christendom, no more than this word assemble, which hath 
been taken out of the French, and now is by custom be- 
come English, as congregation is out of the Latin." ^ Later 
he returns to the charge with the words, "And then must he 
with his translation make us an English vocabulary too." ^ 
In the later period, however, the positions are reversed. 
The conservative party, represented by the Rhemish trans- 
lators, admit that they are employing unfamiUar words, but 
say that it is a question of faithfulness to originals, and that 
the new words "will easily grow to be current and familiar," ^ 
a contention not without basis when one considers how 
much acceptance or rejection by the English Bible could af- 
fect the status of a word. Moreover the introduction of 

1 More, Confutation of Tyndale, Works, p. 417. 

2 Ibid., p. 427. ' Pollard, p. 307. 



70 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

new words into the Scriptures had its parallel in the efforts 
being made elsewhere to enrich the language. The Rhemish 
preface, pubhshed in 1582, almost contemporaneously with 
Lyly's Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia, justifies its practice 
thus: "And why should we be squamish at new words or 
phrases in the Scripture, which are necessary: when we 
do easily admit and follow new words coined in court and 
in courtly or other secular writings?" ^ 

The points at issue received their most thorough con- 
sideration in the controversy between Gregory Martin and 
Wilham Fulke. Martin, one of the translators of the 
Rhemish Testament, pubhshed, in 1582, A Discovery of the 
Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretics of 
our Days, a book in which apparently he attacked all the 
Protestant translations with which he was famiUar, in- 
cluding Beza's Latin Testament and even attempting to 
involve the EngUsh translators in the same condenmation 
with Castalio. Fulke, in his Defence of the Sincere and True 
Translation of the Holy Scriptures, reprinted Martin's Dis- 
covery and repUed to it section by section. Both discussions 
are fragmentary and inconsecutive, but there emerges from 
them at intervals a clear statement of principles. Funda- 
mentally the positions of the two men are very different. 
Martin is not concerned with questions of abstract scholar- 
ship, but with matters of rehgious beHef. "But because 
these places concern no controversy," he says, "I say no 
more." ^ He does not hesitate to place the authority of 
the Fathers before the results of contemporary scholarship. 
"For were not he a wise man, that would prefer one Master 
Humfrey, Master Fulke, Master Whitakers, or some of 
us poor men, because we have a httle smack of the three 
tongues, before St. Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Augustine, 
St. Gregory, or St. Thomas, that understood well none but 
one?"^ Since his field is thus narrowed, he finds it easy 

1 PoUard, p. 291. 2 Defence, p. 42. ^ jj^i^^^ p. 507. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 71 

to lay down definite rules for translation. Fulke, on the 
other hand, believes that translation may be dissociated 
from matters of belief. ''If the translator's purpose were 
evil, yet so long as the words and sense of the original 
tongue will bear him, he cannot justly be called a false and 
heretical translator, albeit he have a false and heretical 
meaning." ^ He is not willing to accept unsupported au- 
thority, even that of the leaders of his own party. "If 
Luther misliked the Tigurine translation," he says in an- 
other attack on the Rhemish version, "it is not sufficient 
to discredit it, seeing truth, and not the opinion or authority 
of men is to be followed in such matters," ^ and again, in 
the Defence, "The Geneva bibles do not profess to translate 
out of Beza's Latin, but out of the Hebrew and Greek; and 
if they agree not always with Beza, what is that to the pur- 
pose, if they agree with the truth of the original text?" ^ 
Throughout the Defence he is on his guard against Martin's 
attempts to drive him into unquahfied acceptance of any 
set formula of translation. 

The crux of the controversy was the treatment of ec- 
clesiastical words. Martin accuses the EngHsh translators 
of interpreting such words in their " etjrniological " sense, 
and consulting profane writers, Homer, Pliny, TuUy, Virgil,^ 
for their meaning, instead of observing the ecclesiastical 
use, which he calls "the usual taking thereof in all vulgar 
speech and writing." ^ Fulke admits part of Martin's 
claim: "We have also answered before that words must not 
always be translated according to their original and general 
signification, but according to such signification as by use 
they are appropried to be taken. We agree also, that 
words taken by custom of speech into an ecclesiastical mean- 
ing are not to be altered into a strange or profane significa- 

1 Defence, p. 210. 

2 Confutation of the Rhemish Testament, New York, 1834, p. 21. 

3 Defence, p. 118. ^ 75^^.^ p^ igQ. ^ i^d., p. 217. 



72 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

tion." ^ But ecclesiastical authority is not always a safe 
guide. ''How the fathers of the church have used words, 
it is no rule for translators of the scriptures to follow; who 
oftentimes used words as the people did take them, and not 
as they signified in the apostles' time." ^ In difficult cases 
there is a peculiar advantage in consulting profane writers, 
''who used the words most indifferently in respect of our 
controversies of which they were altogether ignorant." ^ 
Fulke refuses to be reduced to accept entirely either the 
"comimon" or the "etymological" interpretation. "A 
translator that hath regard to interpret for the ignorant 
people's instruction, may sometimes depart from the ety- 
mology or common signification or precise turning of word 
for word, and that for divers causes." * To one principle, 
however, he will commit himself: the translator must ob- 
serve common English usage. "We are not lords of the 
common speech of men," he writes, "for if we were, we 
would teach them to use their terms more properly; but 
seeing we cannot change the use of speech, we follow Aris- 
totle's counsel, which is to speak and use words as the com- 
mon people useth." ^ Consequently ecclesiastical must 
always give way to popular usage, "Our meaning is not, 
that if any Greek terms, or words of any other language, 
have of long time been usurped in our English language, 
the true meaning of which is unknown at this day to the 
common people, but that the same terms may be either in 
translation or exposition set out plainly, to inform the sim- 
plicity of the ignorant, by such words as of them are better 
understood. Also when those terms are abused by custom 
of speech, to signify some other thing than they were first 
appointed for, or else to be taken ambiguously for divers 
things, we ought not to be superstitious in these cases, but 
to avoid misunderstanding we may use words according 
1 Defence, p. 217. ^ 75^^^^^ p. 152. ^ /^,^ p. igi. 

4 Ibid., p. 58. 5 jii(i^^ p. 267. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 73 

to their original signification, as they were taken in such 
time as they were written by the instruments of the Holy 
Ghost." 1 

Fulke's support of the claims of the EngHsh language is 
not confined to general statements. Acquaintance with 
other languages has given him a definite conception of the 
properties of his own, even in matters of detail. He resents 
the importation of foreign idiom. "If you ask for the 
readiest and most proper English of these words, I must 
answer you, 'an image, a worshipper of images, and wor- 
shipping of images,' as we have sometimes translated. The 
other that you would have, 'idol, idolater, and idolatry,' 
be rather Greekish than Enghsh words; which though they 
be used by many Englishmen, yet are they not understood 
of all as the other be." ^ "You . . . avoid the names of 
elders, calling them ancients, and the wise men sages, as 
though you had rather speak French than English, as we do; 
like as you translate confide, 'have a good heart,' after the 
French phrase, rather than you would say as we do, 'be of 
good comfort.'" ^ Though he admits that English as com- 
pared with older languages is defective in vocabulary, he 
insists that this cannot be remedied by unwarranted coin- 
age of words. "That we have no greater change of words 
to answer so many of the Hebrew tongue, it is of the riches 
of that tongue, and the poverty of our mother language, 
which hath but two words, image and idol, and both of them 
borrowed of the Latin and Greek : as for other words equiv- 
alent, we know not any, and we are loth to make any new 
words of that signification, except the multitude of Hebrew 
words of the same sense coming together do sometimes 
perhaps seem to require it. Therefore as the Greek hath 
fewer words to express this thing than the Hebrew, so hath 
the Latin fewer than the Greek, and the English fewest 
of all, as will appear if you would undertake to give us 

1 Defence, p. 217. ^ 75^^,^ p, 179. 3 75^^.^ p. 90. 



74 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

English words for the thirteen Hebrew words: except you 
would coin such ridiculous inkhorn terms, as you do in the 
New Testament, Azymes, prepuce, neophyte, sandale, 
parasceve, and such like." ^ ''When you say 'evangehzed,' 
you do not translate, but feign a new word, which is not 
understood of mere Enghsh ears." ^ 

Fulke describes himself as never having been ''of counsel 
with any that translated the scriptures into English," ^ but 
his works were regarded with respect, and probably had 
considerable influence on the version of 1611.'* Ironically 
enough, they did much to familiarize the revisers with the 
Rhemish version and its merits. On the other hand, Fulke's 
own views had a distinct value. Though on some points 
he is narrowly conservative, and though some of the words 
which he condemns have estabhshed themselves in the lan- 
guage nevertheless most of his ideas regarding hnguistic 
usage are remarkably sound, and, hke those of More, com- 
mend themselves to modern opinion. 

Between the translators of the Bible and the translators 
of other works there were few points of contact. Though 
similar problems confronted both groups, they presented 
themselves in different guises. The question of increasing 
the vocabulary, for example, is in the case of bibhcal trans- 
lation so comphcated by the theological connotation of 
words as to require a treatment pecuhar to itself. Trans- 
lators of the Bible were scarcely ever translators of secular 
works and vice versa. The chief link between the two kinds 
of translation is supplied by the metrical versions of the 
Psalms. Such verse translations were counted of sufl&cient 
importance to engage the efforts of men like Parker and 
Coverdale, influential in the main course of Bible trans- 
lation. Men like Thomas Norton, the translator of Calvin's 
Institutes, Richard Stanyhurst, the translator of Virgil, and 

1 Defence, p. 206. ^ /^^^^ p_ 549^ 

2 Ihid., p. 89. * Pollard, Introduction, p. 37. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 75 

others of greater literary fame, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, 
Milton, Bacon, experimented, as time went on, with these 
metrical renderings. The list even includes the name of 
King James. ^ 

At first there was some idea of creating for such songs a 
vogue in England like that which the similar productions of 
Marot had enjoyed at the French court. Translators felt 
free to choose what George Wither calls "easy and pas- 
sionate Psalms," and, if they desired, create "elegant- 
seeming paraphrases . . . trimmed ... up with rhetorical 
illustrations (suitable to their fancies, and the changeable 
garb of affected language)." ^ The expectations of courtly 
approbation were, however, largely disappointed, but the 
metrical Psalms came, in time, to have a wider and more 
democratic employment. Complete versions of the Psalms 
in verse came to be regarded as a suitable accompaniment to 
the Bible, until in the Scottish General Assembly of 1601 
the proposition for a new translation of the Bible was ac- 
companied by a parallel proposition for a correction of the 
Psalms in metre. ^ 

Besides this general realization of the practical usefulness 
of these versions in divine service, there was in some quar- 
ters an appreciation of the peculiar literary quality of the 
Psalms which tended to express itself in new attempts at 
translation. Arthur Golding, though not himself the 
author of a metrical version, makes the following comment: 
"For whereas the other parts of holy writ (whether they be 
historical, moral, judicial, ceremonial, or prophetical) do 
commonly set down their treatises in open and plain decla- 
ration: this part consisting of them all, wrappeth up things 

* See Holland, The Psalmists of Britain, London, 1843, for a detailed 
account of such translations. 

2 Preface to The Psalms of David translated into lyric verse, 1632, re- 
printed by the Spenser Society, 1881. 

3 Holland, p. 251. 



76 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

in types and figures, describing them under borrowed per- 
sonages, and oftentimes winding in matters of prevention, 
speaking of things to come as if they were past or present, 
and of things past as if they were in doing, and every man 
is made a betrayer of the secrets of his own heart. And 
forasmuch as it consisteth chiefly of prayer and thanks- 
giving, or (which comprehendeth them both) of invocation, 
which is a communication with God, and requireth rather 
an earnest and devout Hfting up of the mind than a loud or 
curious utterance of the voice: there be many imperfect 
sentences, many broken speeches, and many displaced 
words: according as the party that prayed, was either pre- 
vented with the swiftness of his thoughts, or interrupted 
with vehemency of joy or grief, or forced to surcease through 
infirmity, that he might recover more strength and cheer- 
fulness by interminding God's former promises and bene- 
fits." ^ George Wither finds that the style of the Psalms 
demands a verse translation. ''The language of the Muses," 
he declares, "in which the Psalms were originally written, 
is not so properly expressed in the prose dialect as in verse." 
''I have used some variety of verse," he explains, "because 
prayers, praises, lamentations, triumphs, and subjects which 
are pastoral, heroical, elegiacal, and mixed (all which are 
found in the Psalms) are not properly expressed in one sort 
of measure." ^ 

Besides such perception of the general poetic quality of 
the Psalms as is found in Wither's comment, there was some 
realization that metrical elements were present in various 
books of Scripture. Jerome, in his Preface to Job, had 
called attention to this,^ but the regular translators, whose 

1 Epistle Dedicatory, to T/ie Psalms with M. John Calvin's Com- 
mentaries, 1571. 

2 Op. cit. 

3 See The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Schaff and Wace, 
New York, 1893, p. 491. 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 77 

references to Jerome, though frequent, are somewhat vague, 
apparently made nothing of the suggestion. Elsewhere, 
however, there was an attempt to justify the inclusion of 
translations of the Psalms among other metrical experi- 
ments. Googe, defending the having of the Psalms in 
metre, declares that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other parts of 
the Bible "were written by the first authors in perfect and 
pleasant hexameter verses." ^ Stanyhurst ^ and Fraunce ^ 
both tried putting the Psalms into English hexameters. 
There was, however, no accurate knowledge of the Hebrew 
verse system. The preface to the American Bay Psalm 
Book, published in 1640,^ explains that ''The psalms are 
penned in such verses as are suitable to the poetry of the 
Hebrew language, and not in the common style of such 
other books of the Old Testament as are not poetical. . . . 
Then, as all our English songs (according to the course of 
our English poetry) do run in metre, so ought David's 
psalms to be translated into metre, that we may sing the 
Lord's songs, as in our Enghsh tongue so in such verses as 
are familiar to an Enghsh ear, which are commonly metri- 
cal." It is not possible to reproduce the Hebrew metres. 
''As the Lord hath hid from us the Hebrew tunes, lest we 
should think ourselves bound to imitate them; so also the 
course and frame (for the most part) of their Hebrew poetry, 
that we might not think ourselves bound to imitate that, 
but that every nation without scruple might follow as the 
grave sort of tunes of their own country, so the graver sort 
of verses of their own country's poetry." This had already 
become the common solution of the difficulty, so that even 
Wither keeps to the kinds of verse used in the old Psahn 
books in order that the old tunes may be used. 

1 Holland, Note, p. 89. 

2 Published at the end of his Virgil. 

' In The Countess of Pembroke's Emanuell, 1591. 
* Reprinted, New York, 1903. 



78 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

But though the metrical versions of the Psalms often 
inclined to doggerel, and though they probably had httle, 
if any, influence on the Authorized Version, they made 
their own claims to accuracy, and even after the appear- 
ance of the King James Bible sometimes demanded atten- 
tion as improved renderings. George Wither, for example, 
beheves that in using verse he is being more faithful 
to the Hebrew than are the prose translations. ''There 
is," he says, "sl poetical emphasis in many places, which 
requires such an alteration in the grammatical expression, 
as will seem to make some difference in the judgment of 
the conamon reader; whereas it giveth best hfe to the au- 
thor's intention; and makes that perspicuous which was 
made obscure by those mere grammatical interpreters, who 
were not acquainted with the proprieties and liberties of this 
kind of writing." His version is, indeed, ''so easy to be un- 
derstood, that some readers have confessed, it hath been 
instead of a comment unto them in sundry hard places." 
His rendering is not based merely on existing English ver- 
sions; he has "the warrant of best Hebrew grammarians, 
the authority of the Septuagint, and Chaldean paraphrase, 
the example of the ancient and of the best modern prose 
translators, together with the general practice and allow- 
ance of all orthodox expositors." Like Wither, other trans- 
lators went back to original sources and made their verse 
renderings real exercises in translation rather than mere 
variations on the accepted Enghsh text. From this point 
of view their work had perhaps some value; and though it 
seems regrettable that practically nothing of permanent 
hterary importance should have resulted from such repeated 
experiments, they are interesting at least as affording some 
connection between the sphere of the regular translators and 
the hterary world outside. 



III. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 



I 



Ill 

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 

The Elizabethan period presents translations in as- 
tonishing number and variety. As the spirit of the Re- 
naissance began to inspire England, translators responded 
to its stimulus with an enthusiasm denied to later times. 
It was work that appealed to persons of varying ranks and 
of varying degrees of learning. In the early part of the 
century, according to Nash, ''every private scholar, William 
Turner and who not, began to vaunt their smattering of 
Latin in English impressions." ^ Thomas Nicholls, the 
goldsmith, translated Thucydides; Queen Elizabeth trans- 
lated Boethius. The mention of women in this connection 
suggests how widely the impulse was diffused. Richard 
Hyrde says of the translation of Erasmus's Treatise on the 
Lord's Prayer, made by Margaret Roper, the daughter of 
Sir Thomas More, ''And as for the translation thereof, I 
dare be bold to say it, that whoso list and well can confer 
and examine the translation with the original, he shall not 
fail to find that she hath showed herself not only erudite 
and elegant in either tongue, but hath also used such wis- 
dom, such discreet and substantial judgment, in expressing 
lively the Latin, as a man may peradventure miss in many 
things translated and turned by them that bear the name of 
right wise and very well learned men." ^ Nicholas Udall 
writes to Queen Katherine that there are a number of women 
in England who know Greek and Latin and are "in the 

1 Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I^ p. 313. 

2 Introduction, in Foster Watson, Vives and the Renaissance Educa- 
tion of Women, 1912. 

81 



82 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

holy scriptures and theolog;}^ so ripe .that they are able 
aptly, cunningly, and with much grace either to endite or 
translate into the vulgar tongue for the public instruction 
and edifying of the unlearned multitude." ^ 

The greatness of the field was fitted to arouse and sus- 
tain the ardor of English translators. In contrast with the 
number of manuscripts at command in earlier days, the 
sixteenth century must have seemed endlessly rich in books. 
Printing was making the Greek and Latin classics newly 
accessible, and France and Italy, awake before England to 
the new life, were storing the vernacular with translations 
and with new creations. Translators might find their 
tasks difficult enough and they might flag by the way, as 
Hoby confesses to have done at the end of the third book 
of The Courtier, but plucking up courage, they went on to 
the end. Hoby declares, with a vigor that suggests Bun- 
yan's Pilgrim, "I whetted my style and settled myself to 
take in hand the other three books"; ^ Edward Hello wes, 
after the hesitation which he describes in the Dedication to 
the 1574 edition of Guevara's Familiar Epistles, ''began to 
call to mind my God, my Prince, my country, and also your 
worship," and so adequately upheld, went on with his 
undertaking; Arthur Golding, with a breath of relief, sees 
his rendering of Ovid's Metamorphoses at last complete. 

Through Ovid's work of turned shapes I have with painful pace 
Passed on, until I had attained the end of all my race. 
And now I have him made so well acquainted with our tongue, 
As that he may in English verse as in his own be sung." ^ 

Sometimes the toilsomeness of the journey was Hghtened 
by companionship. Now and then, especially in the case 

1 Letter prejfixed to John, in Paraphrase of Erasmus on the New Testa- 
ment, London, 1548. 

2 Dedication, 1588. 

3 To the Reader, in Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. W. H. D. Rouse, 1904. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 83 

of religious works, there was collaboration. Luther's Com- 
mentary on Galatians was undertaken by '' certain godly 
men," of whom '^some began it according to such skill as 
they had. Others godly affected, not suffering so good a 
matter in handling to be marred, put to their helping hands 
for the better framing and furthering of so worthy a work."^ 
From Thomas Norton's record of the conditions under 
which he translated Calvin's Institution of the Christian 
Religion, it is not difficult to feel the atmosphere of sym- 
pathy and encouragement in which he worked. "There- 
fore in the very beginning of the Queen's Majesty's most 
blessed reign," he writes, ''I translated it out of Latin into 
English, for the commodity of the Church of Christ, at the 
special request of my dear friends of worthy memory, 
Reginald Wolfe and Edward Whitchurch, the one Her 
Majesty's Printer for the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin 
tongues, the other her Highness' Printer of the books of 
Common Prayer. I performed my work in the house of my 
said friend, Edward Whitchurch, a man well known of 
upright heart and dealing, an ancient zealous Gospeller, as 
plain and true a friend as ever I knew living, and as de- 
sirous to do anything to common good, specially to the ad- 
vancement of true religion. ... In the doing hereof I 
did not only trust mine own wit or ability, but examined 
my whole doing from sentence to sentence throughout the 
whole book with conference and overlooking of such learned 
men, as my translation being allowed by their judgment, 
I did both satisfy mine own conscience that I had done 
truly, and their approving of it might be a good warrant 
to the reader that nothing should herein be delivered him 
but sound, unmingled and uncorrupted doctrine, even in 
such sort as the author himself had first framed it. All 
that I wrote, the grave, learned, and virtuous man, M. 

1 Bishop of London's preface To the Reader, in A Commentary of Dr. 
Martin Luther upon the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians, London, 1577.. 



84 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

David Whitehead (whom I name with honorable remem- 
brance) did among others, compare with the Latin, examin- 
ing every sentence throughout the whole book. Beside all 
this, I privately required many, and generally all men with 
whom I ever had any talk of this matter, that if they found 
anything either not truly translated or not plainly Eng- 
lished, they would inform me thereof, promising either to 
satisfy them or to amend it." ^ Norton's next sentence, 
"Since which time I have not been advertised by any man 
of anything which they would require to be altered" prob- 
ably expresses the fate of most of the many requests for 
criticism that accompany translations, but does not es- 
sentially modify the impression he conveys of unusually 
favorable conditions for such work. One remembers that 
Tyndale originally anticipated with some confidence a resi- 
dence in the Bishop of London's house while he translated 
the Bible. Thomas Wilson, again, says of his translation 
of some of the orations of Demosthenes that ''even in these 
my small travails both Cambridge and Oxford men have 
given me their learned advice and in some things have set 
to their helping hand," ^ and Florio declares that it is owing 
to the help and encouragement of ''two supporters of knowl- 
edge and friendship," Theodore Diodati and Dr. Gwinne, 
that "upheld and armed" he has "passed the pikes." ^ 

The translator was also sustained by a conception of the 
importance of his work, a conception sometimes exag- 
gerated, but becoming, as the century progressed, clearly 
and truly defined. Between the lines of the dedication 
which Henry Parker, Lord Morley, prefixes to his transla- 
tion of Petrarch's Triumphs,'^ one reads a pathetic story of 
an appreciation which can hardly have equaled the hopes 

^ Preface to The Institution of the Christian Religion, London, 1578. 

2 Preface to The Three Orations of Demosthenes, London, 1570. 

^ Dedication of Montaigne's Essays, London, 1603. 

4 Reprinted, Roxburghe Club, 1887. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 85 

of the author. He writes of ''one of late days that was 
groom of the chamber with that renowned and valiant 
prince of high memory, Francis the French king, whose 
name I have forgotten, that did translate these triumphs 
to that said king, which he took so thankfully that he gave 
to him for his pains an hundred crowns, to him and to his 
heirs of inheritance to enjoy to that value in land forever, 
and took such pleasure in it that wheresoever he went, 
among his precious jewels that book always carried with 
him for his pastime to look upon, and as much esteemed by 
him as the richest diamond he had." Moved by patriotic 
emulation. Lord Morley "translated the said book to that 
most worthy king, our late sovereign lord of perpetual 
memory. King Henry the Eighth, who as he was a prince 
above all others most excellent, so took he the work very 
thankfully, marvelling much that I could do it, and think- 
ing verily I had not done it without help of some other, 
better knowing in the Italian tongue than I; but when he 
knew the very truth, that I had translated the work myself, 
he was more pleased therewith than he was before, and so 
what his highness did with it is to me unknown." 

Hyperbole in estimating the value of the translator's 
work is not conmion among Lord Morley's successors, but 
their very recognition of the secondary importance of trans- 
lation often resulted in a modest yet dignified insistence on 
its real value. Richard Eden says that he has labored 
''not as an author but as a translator, lest I be injurious to 
any man in ascribing to myseK the travail of other." ^ 
Nicholas Grimald quaUfies a translation of Cicero as "my 
work," and immediately adds, "I call it mine as Plautus 
and Terence called the comedies theirs which they made 
out of Greek." ^ Harrington, the translator of Orlando 

^ Preface to The Book of Metals, in Arber, The First Three English 
Books on America, 1885. 

2 Dedication of Marcos Tullius Cicero's Three Books of Duties, 1558. 



86 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Furioso, says of his work: "I had rather men should see 
and know that I borrow at all than that I steal any, and I 
would wish to be called rather one of the worst translators 
than one of the meaner makers, specially since the Earl of 
Surrey and Sir Thomas Wiat, that are yet called the first 
refiners of the English tongue, were both translators out of 
the Italian. Now for those that count it such a contempt- 
ible and trifling matter to translate, I will but say to them 
as M. Bartholomew Clarke, an excellent learned man and 
a right good translator, said in a manner of pretty challenge, 
in his Preface (as I remember) upon the Courtier, which 
book he translated out of Italian into Latin. 'You,' saith 
he, 'that think it such a toy, lay aside my book, and take 
my author in hand, and try a leaf or such a matter, and 
compare it with mine.'" ^ Philemon Holland, the "trans- 
lator general" of his time, writes of his art: ''As for myself, 
since it is neither my hap nor hope to attain to such per- 
fection as to bring forth something of mine own which may 
quit the pains of a reader, and much less to perform any 
action that might minister matter to a writer, and yet so 
far bound unto my native country and the blessed state 
wherein I have lived, as to render an account of my years 
passed and studies employed, during this long time of peace 
and tranquilUty, wherein (under the most gracious and 
happy government of a peerless princess, assisted with so 
prudent, politic, and learned Counsel) all good literature 
hath had free progress and flourished in no age so much: 
methought I owed this duty, to leave for my part also (after 
many others) some small memorial, that might give testi- 
mony another day what fruits generally this peaceable age 
of ours hath produced. Endeavored I have therefore to 
stand in the third rank, and bestowed those hours which 
might be spared from the practice of my profession and the 
necessary cares of life, to satisfy my countrymen now living 
1 A Brief Apology for Poetry, in Gregory Smith, vol. 2, p. 219. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 87 

and to gratify the age ensuing in this kind." ^ To Holland's 
simple acceptance of his rightful place, it is pleasant to add 
the lines of the poet Daniel, whose imagination was stirred 
in true Elizabethan fashion by the larger relations of the 
translator. Addressing Florio, the interpreter of Montaigne 
to the English people, he thanks him on behalf of both 
author and readers for 

... his studious care 

Who both of him and us doth merit much, 

Having as sumptuously as he is rare 

Placed him in the best lodging of our speech, 

And made him now as free as if born here. 

And as well ours as theirs, who may be proud 

To have the franchise of his worth allowed. 

It being the proportion of a happy pen, 

Not to b'invassal'd to one monarchy. 

But dwell with all the better world of men 

Whose spirits are of one community. 

Whom neither Ocean, Deserts, Rocks, nor Sands 

Can keep from th' intertraffic of the mind." ^ 

In a less exalted strain come suggestions that the trans- 
lator's work is valuable enough to deserve some tangible 
recognition. Thomas Fortescue urges his reader to con- 
sider the case of workmen like himself, ''assuring thyself 
that none in any sort do better deserve of their country, 
that none swink or sweat with like pain and anguish, 
that none in like sort hazard or adventure their credit, that 
none desire less stipend or salary for their travail, that 
none in fine are worse in this age recompensed. " ^ Nicholas 
Udall presents detailed reasons why it is to be desired that 
''some able, worthy, and meet persons for doing such public 
benefit to the commonweal as translating of good works 

1 Preface to The Natural History of C. Plinius Secundus, London, 
1601. 

2 Letter to John Florio, in Florio's Montaigne, Tudor Translations. 

3 To the Reader, in The Forest, London, 1576. 



88 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

and writing of chronicles might by some good provision and 
means have some condign sustentation in the same." ^ 
''Besides/' he argues, ''that such a translator travaileth 
not to his own private commodity, but to the benefit and 
public use of his country: besides that the thing is such 
as must so thoroughly occupy and possess the doer, and 
must have him so attent to apply that same exercise only, 
that he may not during that season take in hand any other 
trade of business whereby to purchase his Hving: besides 
that the thing cannot be done without bestowing of long 
time, great watching, much pains, diligent study, no small 
charges, as well of meat, drink, books, as also of other neces- 
saries, the labor self is of itself a more painful and more 
tedious thing than for a man to write or prosecute any 
argument of his own invention. A man hath his own in- 
vention ready at his own pleasure without lets or stops, to 
make such discourse as his argument requireth: but a 
translator must ... at every other word stay, and sus- 
pend both his cogitation and his pen to look upon his author, 
so that he might in equal time make thrice as much as he 
can be able to translate." 

The belief present in the comment of both Fortescue and 
Udall that the work of the translator is of pecuhar service 
to the state is expressed in connection with translations of 
every sort. Richard Taverner declares that he has been 
incited to put into English part of the Chiliades of Erasmus 
by "the love I bear to the furtherance and adornment 
of my native country." ^ William Warde translates The 
Secrets of Maister Alexis of Piemont in order that "as well 
Englishmen as Italians, Frenchmen, or Dutchmen may 
suck knowledge and profit hereof."^ John Brende, in the 

^ Dedication to Edward VI, in Paraphrase of Erasmus. 
2 Prologue to Proverbs or Adagies with new additions gathered out of the 
Chiliades of Erasmus by Richard Taverner, London, 1539. 
2 Epistle prefixed to translation, 1568. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 89 

Dedication of his History of Quintun Curtius, insLstvS on the 
importance of historical knowledge, his appreciation of 
which has made him desire "that we Englishmen might be 
found as forward in that behalf as other nations, which ha.ve 
brought all worthy histories into their natural language." ^ 
Patriotic emulation of what has been done in other coun- 
tries is everywhere present as a motive. Occasionally the 
Englishman shows that he has studied foreign translations 
for his own guidance. Adlington, in his preface to his 
rendering of The Golden Ass of Apuleius, says that he does 
not follow the original in certain respects, ''for so the French 
and Spanish translators have not done";^ Hoby says of 
his translation of The Ccmrtier, ''I have endeavored myself 
to follow the very meaning and words of the author, without 
being misled by fantasy or leaving out any parcel one or 
other, whereof I know not how some interpreters of this 
book into other languages can excuse themselves, and the 
more they be conferred, the more it will perchance ap- 
pear." ^ On the whole, however, the comment confines 
itself to general statements like that of Grimald, who in 
translating Cicero is endeavoring "to do hkewise for my 
countrymen as Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Dutchmen, 
and other foreigners have liberally done for theirs." ^ In 
spite of the remarkaVjle output England lagged behind other 
countries. Lord Morley complains that the printing of a 
merry jest is more profitable than the putting forth of such 
excellent works as those of Petrarch, of which England has 
"very few or none, which I do lament in my heart, con- 
sidering that as well in French as in the Itahan (in the 
which both tongues I have some httle knowledge) there is 
no excellent work in the Latin, but that straightway they 
set it forth in the vulgar." ^ Morley wrote in the early days 

1 Published, Tottell, 1.561. 2 Reprinted, London, 191.5. 

3 Dedication in edition of 1.588. * Op. dt. 

^ Dedication, op. cit. 



90 EARLY THEORIES 01^ TRANSLATION 

of the movement for translation, but later translators made 
similar complaints. Hoby says in the preface to The Court- 
ier: "In this point (I know not by what destiny) EngUsh- 
men are most inferior to most of all other nations: for 
where they set their dehght and bend themselves with an 
honest strife of matching others to turn into their mother 
tongue not only the witty writings of other languages but 
also of all philosophers, and all sciences both Greek and 
Latin, our men ween it sufficient to have a perfect knowl- 
edge to no other end but to profit themselves and (as it 
were) after much pains in breaking up a gap bestow no less 
to close it up again." To the end of the century translation 
is encouraged or defended on the ground that it is a public 
duty. Thomas Danett is urged to translate the History 
of Philip de Comines by certain gentlemen who think it "a 
great dishonor to our native land that so worthy a history 
being extant in all languages almost in Christendom should 
be suppressed in ours";^ Chapman writes indignantly of 
Homer, ''And if Itahan, French, and Spanish have not 
made it dainty, nor thought it any presmnption to turn 
him into their languages, but a fit and honorable labor and 
(in respect of their country's profit and their prince's credit) 
almost necessary, what curious, proud, and poor shamefast- 
ness should let an English muse to traduce him?" ^ 

Besides all this, the translator's conception of his audience 
encouraged and guided his pen. While translations in 
general could not pretend to the strength and universahty 
of appeal which belonged to the Bible, nevertheless taken 
in the mass and judged only by the comment associated 
with them, they suggest a varied pubhc and a surprising 
contact with the essential interests of mankind. The ap- 
peals on title pages and in prefaces to all kinds of people, 

1 Dedication, dated 1596, of The History of Philip de Comines, London, 
1601. 

2 Dedication of Achilles' Shield in Gregory Smith, vol. 2, p. 300. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 91 

from ladies and gentlemen of rank to the common and 
simple sort, not infrequently resemble the calculated praises 
of the advertiser, but admitting this, there still remains 
much that implies a simple confidence in the response of 
friendly readers. Rightly or wrongly, the translator pre- 
supposes for himself in many cases an audience far removed 
from academic preoccupations. Richard Eden, translating 
from the Spanish Martin Cortes' Arte de Navigar, says, 
''Now therefore this work of the Art of Navigation being 
published in our vulgar tongue, you may be assured to have 
more store of skilful pilots." ^ Golding's translations of 
Pomponius Mela and Juhus Solinus Polyhistor are described 
as, ''Right pleasant and profitable for Gentlemen, Mer- 
chants, Mariners, and Travellers." ^ Hellowes, with an 
excess of rhetoric which takes from his convincingness, pre- 
sents Guevara's Familiar Epistles as teaching "rules for 
kings to rule, counselors to counsel, prelates to practise, 
captains to execute, soldiers to perform, the married to 
follow, the prosperous to prosecute, and the poor in ad- 
versity to be comforted, how to write and talk with all men 
in all matters at large." ^ Holland's honest simplicity gives 
greater weight to a similarly sweeping characterization of 
Pliny's Natural History as "not appropriate to the learned 
only, but accommodate to the rude peasant of the country; 
fitted for the painful artisan in town or city; pertinent to 
the bodily health of man, woman, or child; and in one word 
suiting with all sorts of people living in a society and com- 
monweal." ^ In the same preface the need for replying to 
those who oppose translation leads Holland to insist further 
on the practical applicability of his matter. Alternating 
his own with his critics' position, he writes: "It is a shame 
(quoth one) that Livy speaketh English as he doth; Latin- 

1 Preface in Arber, op. cit. 

2 Preface, dated 1584, to translation published 1590. 

' Title page, 1574. * To the Reader, op. cit. 



92 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

ists only owe to be acquainted with him: as who should 
say the soldier were to have recourse to the university for 
military skill and knowledge, or the scholar to put on arms 
and pitch a camp. What should Pliny (saith another) be 
read in English and the mysteries couched in his books 
divulged; as if the husbandman, the mason, carpenter, gold- 
smith, lapidary, and engraver, with other artificers, were 
bound to seek unto great clerks or hnguists for instructions 
in their several arts." Wilson's translation of Demosthenes, 
again, undertaken, it has been said, with a view to rousing 
a national resistance against Spain, is described on the title 
page as ''most needful to be read in these dangerous days 
of all them that love their country's liberty." ^ 

Naturally enough, however, especially in the case of trans- 
lations from the Latin and Greek, the academic interest 
bulks largely in the audience, and sometimes makes an un- 
expected demand for recognition in the midst of the more 
practical appeal. Holland's Pliny, for example, addresses 
itself not only to peasants and artisans but to young stu- 
dents, who ''by the light of the English . . . shall be able 
more readily to go away with the dark phrase and obscure 
constructions of the Latin." Chapman, refusing to be 
burdened with a popular audience, begins a preface with 
the insidious compliment, "I suppose you to be no mere 
reader, smce you intend to read Homer." ^ On the other 
hand, the academic reader, whether student or critic, is, 
if one accepts the translator's view, very much on the alert, 
anxious to confer the Enghsh version with the original, either 
that he may improve his own knowledge of the foreign 
language or that he may pick faults in the new rendering. 
Wilson attacks the critics as "drones and no bees, lubbers 
and no learners," but the fault he finds in these "croaking 

1 London, 1570. 

2 Preface to Seven Books of the Iliad of Homer, in Gregory Smith, 
vol. 2, p. 293. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 93 

paddocks and manifest overweeners of themselves" is that 
they are ''out of reason curious judges over the travail and 
painstaking of others" instead of being themselves pro- 
ducers.^ Apparently there was little fear of the indifference 
which is more discouraging than hostile criticism, and 
though, as is to be expected, it is the hostile criticism that 
is most often reflected in prefaces, there must have been 
much kindly comment like that of Webbe, who, after dis- 
cussing the relations of Phaer's Virgil to the Latin, con- 
cludes, "There is not one book among the twelve which 
will not yield you most excellent pleasure in conferring the 
translation with the copy and marking the gallant grace 
which our English speech affordeth." ^ 

Such encouragements and incentives are enough to 
awaken the envy of the modern translator. But the six- 
teenth century had also its peculiar difficulties. The 
English language was neither so rich in resources nor so 
carefully standardized as it has become of later times. It 
was often necessary, indeed, to defend it against the charge 
that it was not equal to translation. Pettie is driven to 
reply to those who oppose the use of the vernacular be- 
cause "they count it barren, they count it barbarous, they 
count it unworthy to be accounted of." ^ Chapman says 
in his preface to Achilles' Shield: "Some will convey their 
imperfections under his Greek shield, and from thence 
bestow bitter arrows against the traduction, affirming their 
want of admiration grows from the defect of our language, 
not able to express the copiousness (coppie) and elegancy 
of the original." Richard Green way, who translated the 
Annals of Tacitus, admits cautiously that his medium is 
"perchance not so fit to set out a piece drawn with so curi- 
ous a pencil." * One cannot, indeed, help recognizing that 

1 Op. cit. 2 Gregory Smith, vol. 1, p. 262. 

3 Preface to Civile Conversation of Stephen Guazzo, 1586. 

^ Dedication of The End of Nero and Beginning of Galba, 1598. 



94 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

as compared with modern English EUzabethan EngUsh was 
weak in resources, Hmited in vocabulary, and somewhat 
uncertain in sentence structure. These disadvantages prob- 
ably account in part for such explanations of the relative 
difficulty of translation as that of Nicholas Udall in his plea 
that translators should be suitably recompensed or that of 
John Brende in his preface to the translation of Quintus 
Curtius that ''in translation a man cannot always use his 
own vein, but shall be compelled to tread in the author's 
steps, which is a harder and more difficult thing to do, than 
to walk his own pace." ^ 

Of his difficulties with sentence structure the translator 
says httle, a fact rather surprising to the modern reader, 
conscious as he is of the awkwardness of the EUzabethan 
sentence. Now and then, however, he hints at the problems 
which have arisen in the handling of the Latin period. 
Udall writes of his translation of Erasmus: "I have in some 
places been driven to use mine own judgment in rendering 
the true sense of the book, to speak nothing of a great num- 
ber of sentences, which by reason of so many members, or 
parentheses, or digressions as have come in places, are so 
long that unless they had been somewhat divided, they 
would have been too hard for an unlearned brain to con- 
ceive, much more hard to contain and keep it still." ^ Ad- 
lington, the translator of The Golden Ass of Apuleius, says, 
*'I have not so exactly passed through the author as to point 
every sentence exactly as it is in the Latin." ^ A comment 
of Foxe on his difficulty in translating contemporary Eng- 
lish into Latin suggests that he at least was conscious of 
the weakness of the English sentence as compared with the 
Latin. Writing to Peter Martyr of his Latin version of 
the controversy between Cranmer and Gardiner, he says 
of the latter: ''In his periods, for the most part, he is so 

^ Op. cit. 2 Address to Queen Katherine, prefixed to Luke. 

2 Preface. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 95 

profuse, that he seems twice to forget himself, rather than 
to find his end. The whole phrase hath in effect that 
structure that consisting for the most part of relatives, it 
refuses almost all the grace of translation." ^ 

Though the question of sentence structure was not given 
prominence, the problem of rectifying deficiencies in vocab- 
ulary touched the translator very nearly. The possibility 
of augmenting the language was a vital issue in the reign 
of Elizabeth, but it had a peculiar significance where 
translation was concerned. Here, if anywhere, the need for 
a large vocabulary was felt, and in translations many new 
words first made their appearance. Sir Thomas Elyot 
early made the connection between translation and the 
movement for increase in vocabulary. In the Proheme to 
The Knowledge which maketh a wise man he explains that in 
The Governor he intended "to augment the English tongue, 
whereby men should . . . interpret out of Greek, Latin, or 
any other tongue into English." ^ Later in the century 
Peele praises the translator Harrington, 

. . . well-letter'd and discreet, 

That hath so purely naturalized 

Strange words, and made them all free denizens/ 

and — to go somewhat outside the period — the fourth 
edition of BuUokar's English Expositor, originally designed 
to teach "the interpretation of the hardest words used in 
our language," is recommended on the ground that those 
who know no language but the mother tongue, but "are 
yet studiously desirous to read those learned and elegant 
treatises which from their native original have been ren- 
dered English (of which sort, thanks to the company of 

1 Translated in Strype, Life of Grindal, Oxford, 1821, p. 22. 

2 Preface to The Governor, ed. Croft. 

3 Ad Maecenatem Prologus to Order of the Garter, in Works, ed. 
Dyce, p. 584. 



96 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

painful translators we have not a few) have here a volume 
fit for their purposes, as carefully designed for their 
assistance." ^ 

Whether, however, the translator should be allowed to 
add to the vocabulary and what methods he should em- 
ploy were questions by no means easy of settlement. As 
in Caxton's time, two possible means of acquiring new words 
were suggested, naturalization of foreign words and revival 
of words from older English sources. Against the first of 
these methods there was a good deal of prejudice. Grimald 
in his preface to his translation of Cicero's De Offidis, pro- 
tests against the translation that is '^uttered with inkhorn 
terms and not with usual words." Other critics are more 
specific in their condemnation of non-English words. Put- 
tenham complains that Southern, in translating Ronsard's 
French rendering of Pindar's hymns and Anacreon's odes, 
"doth so impudently rob the French poet both of his praise 
and also of his French terms, that I cannot so much pity 
him as be angry with him for his injurious dealing, our 
said maker not being ashamed to use these French words, 
freddon, egar, suberbous, filanding, celest, calabrois, thebanois 
and a number of others, which have no manner of con- 
formity with our language either by custom or derivation 
which may make them tolerable." ^ Richard Willes, in 
his preface to the 1577 edition of Eden's History of Travel 
in the West and East Indies, Fays that though English lit- 
erature owes a large debt to Eden, still ''many of his Enghsh 
words cannot be excused in my opinion for smelling too 
much of the Latin." ^ The list appended is not so remote 
from the modern English vocabulary as that which Putten- 
ham supplies. Willes cites "dominators, ponderous, dition- 

1 Quoted in J. L. Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views on the Growth, Status, 
and Destiny of the English Language. 

2 InGTegorySimth., Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 2, p. 171. 

3 Quoted in Moore, op. cit. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 97 

aries, portentous, antiques, despicable, solicitate, obsequious, 
homicide, imbibed, destructive, prodigious, with other such 
Hke, in the stead of lords, weighty, subjects, wonderful, an- 
cient, low, careful, dutiful, man-slaughter, drunken, noisome, 
monstrous, &c." Yet there were some advocates of the use 
of foreign words. Florio admits with mock humihty that 
he has employed "some uncouth terms as entraine, con- 
scientious, endear, tarnish, comport, efface, facilitate, amusing 
debauching, regret, effort, emotion, and such hke/' and con- 
tinues, "If you hke them not, take others most commonly 
set by them to expound them, since they were set to 
make such likely French words familiar with our Eng- 
lish, which may well bear them," ^ a contention which 
modern usage supports. Nicholas Udall pronounces judi- 
cially in favor of both methods of enriching the language. 
"Some there be," he says, "which have a mind to renew 
terms that are now almost worn clean out of use, which I 
do not disallow, so it be done with judgment. Some others 
would ampliate and enrich their native tongue with more 
vocables, which also I commend, if it be aptly and wittily 
assayed. So that if any other do innovate and bring up 
to me a word afore not used or not heard, I would not dis- 
praise it : and that I do attempt to bring it into use, another 
man should not cavil at." ^ George Pettie also defends the 
use of inkhorn terms. "Though for my part," he says, 
"I use those words as little as any, yet I know no reason 
why I should not use them, for it is indeed the ready way 
to enrich our tongue and make it copious." ^ On the whole, 
however, it was safer to advocate the formation of words 
from Anglo-Saxon sources. Golding says of his transla- 
tion of Philip of Mornay: "Great care hath been taken by 
forming and deriving of fit names and terms out of the 

1 To the Reader, in 1603 edition of Montaigne's Essays. 

2 Address to Queen Katherine, prefixed to Luke. 

3 To the Reader in Civile Conversation of Stephen Guazzo, 1586. 



98 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

fountains of our own tongue, though not altogether most 
usual yet always conceivable and easy to be understood; 
rather than by usurping Latin terms, or by borrowing the 
words of any foreign language, lest the matters, which in 
some cases are mystical enough of themselves by reason of 
their own profoundness, might have been made more ob- 
scure to the unlearned by setting them down in terms 
utterly unknown to them." ^ Holland says in the preface 
to his translation of Livy: "I framed my pen, not to any 
affected phrase, but to a mean and popular style. Wherein 
if I have called again into use some old words, let it be at- 
tributed to the love of my country's language." Even in 
this matter of vocabulary, it will be noted, there was some- 
thing of the stimulus of patriotism, and the possibility of 
improving his native tongue must have appealed to the 
translator's creative power. Phaer, indeed, alleges as one 
of his motives for translating Virgil ''defence of my country's 
language, which I have heard discommended of many, and 
esteemed of some to be more than barbarous." ^ 

Convinced, then, that his undertaking, though difficult, 
meant much both to the individual and to the state, the 
translator gladly set about making some part of the great 
field of foreign hterature, ancient and modern, accessible to 
English readers. Of the technicalities of his art he has a 
good deal to say. At a time when prefaces and dedications 
so frequently established personal relations between author 
and audience, it was natural that the translator also should 
take his readers into his confidence regarding his aims and 
methods. His comment, however, is largely incidental. 
Generally it is applicable only to the work in hand; it does 
not profess to be a statement, even on a small scale, of what 
translation in general ought to be. There is no discussion 

1 Preface, 1587. 

2 Master Phaer^s Conclusion to his Interpretation of the Aeneidos of 
Virgil, in edition of 1573. 



4 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 99 

in English corresponding to the small, but comprehensive 
treatise on La maniere de hien traduire d^une langue en autre 
which fitienne Dolet published at Lyons in 1540. This 
casual quality is evidenced by the peculiar way in which 
prefaces in different editions of the same book appear and 
disappear for no apparent reason, possibly at the conven- 
ience of the printer. It is scarcely fair to interpret as con- 
sidered, deliberate formulation of principles, utterances so 
unpremeditated and fragmentary. The theory which ac- 
companies secular translation is much less clear and con- 
secutive than that which accompanies the translation of 
the Bible. Though in the latter case the formulation of 
theories of translation was almost equally incidental, re- 
spect for the original, repeated experiment, and constant 
criticism and discussion united to make certain principles 
take very definite shape. Secular translation produced 
nothing so homogeneous. The existence of so many trans- 
lators, working for the most part independently of each 
other, resulted in a confused mass of comment whose real 
value it is difficult to estimate. It is true that the new 
scholarship with its clearer estimate of literary values and 
its appreciation of the individual's proprietary rights in his 
own writings made itself strongly felt in the sphere of secular 
translation and introduced new standards of accuracy, new 
definitions of the latitude which might be accorded the 
translator; but much of the old freedom in handling ma- 
terial, with the accompanying vagueness as to the limits 
of the translator's function, persisted throughout the time 
of Elizabeth. 

In many cases the standards recognized by sixteenth- 
century translators were little more exacting than those 
of the medieval period. With many writers adequate recog- 
nition of source was a matter of choice rather than of ob- 
ligation. The English translator might make suitable 
attribution of a work to its author and he might undertake 



100 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

to reproduce its substance in its entirety, but he might, on 
the other hand, fail to acknowledge any indebtedness to a 
predecessor or he might add or omit material, since he was 
governed apparently only by the extent of his own powers 
or by his conception of what would be most pleasing or 
edifying to his readers. To the theory of his art he gave 
little serious consideration. He did not attempt to analyse 
the style of the source which he had chosen. If he praised 
his author, it was in the conventional language of compli- 
ment, which showed no real discrimination and which, one 
suspects, often disguised mere advertising. His estimate of 
his own capabilities was only the repetition of the medieval 
formula, with its profession of inadequacy for the task and 
its claim to have used simple speech devoid of rhetorical 
ornament. That it was nothing but a formula was recog- 
nized at the time and is good-naturedly pointed out in the 
words of Harrington: ''Certainly if I should confess or 
rather profess that my verse is unartificial, the style rude, 
the phrase barbarous, the metre unpleasant, many more 
would believe it to be so than would imagine that I thought 
them so." ^ 

This medieval quality, less excusable later in the century 
when the new learning had declared itself, appears with 
more justification in the comment of the early sixteenth 
century. Though the translator's field was widening and 
was becoming more broadly European, the works chosen for 
translation belonged largely to the types popular in the 
Middle Ages and the comment attached to them was a 
repetition of timeworn phrases. Alexander Barclay, who 
is best known as the author of The Ship of Fools, published 
in 1508, but who also has to his credit several other trans- 
lations of contemporary moral and allegorical poems from 
Latin and French and even, in anticipation of the newer 

1 A Brief Apology for Poetry, in Gregory Smith, vol. 1, pp. 217-18. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 101 

era, a version of Sallust's Jugurthine War, offers his trans- 
lations of The Ship of Fools ^ and of Mancini's Mirror of 
Good Manners ^ not to the learned, who might judge of their 
correctness, but to ''rude people," who may hope to be 
benefited morally by perusing them. He has written The 
Ship of Fools in "common and rural terms"; he does not 
follow the author ''word by word"; and though he professes 
to have reproduced for the most part the "sentence" of the 
original, he admits "sometimes adding, sometimes detract- 
ing and taking away such things as seemeth me unnecessary 
and superfluous." ^ His contemporary. Lord Berners, writes 
for a more courtly audience, but he professes much the same 
methods. He introduces his Arthur of Little Britain, ''not 
presuming that I have reduced it into fresh, ornate, polished 
English, for I know myself insufficient in the facundious art 
of rhetoric, and also I am but a learner of the language of 
French: howbeit I trust my simple reason hath led me to 
the understanding of the true sentence of the matter." * 
Of his translation of Froissart he says, "And in that I have 
not followed mine author word by word, yet I trust I have 
ensued the true report of the sentence of the matter." ^ 
Sir Francis Bryan, under whose direction Berners' transla- 
tion of The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius was issued in 
1535, the year after its author's death, expresses his admira- 
tion of the "high and sweet styles" ^ of the versions in other 
languages which have preceded this English rendering, but 
similar phrases had been used so often in the characteriza- 
tion of undistinguished writings that this comment hardly 
suggests the new and peculiar quality of Guevara's style. 
As the century advanced, these older, easier standards 

1 Ed. T. H. Jamieson, Edinburgh, 1874. 

2 Reprinted, Spenser Society, 1885. ' The Argument. 
* Reprinted, London, 1814, Prologue. 

6 Ed. E. V. Utterson, London, 1812, Preface. 
^ The Golden Book, London, 1538, Conclusion. 



102 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

were maintained especially among translators who chose 
material similar to that of Barclay and Berners, the popular 
work of edification, the novella, which took the place of 
the romance. The pm"veyors of entertaining narrative, 
indeed, reahzed in some degree the minor importance of 
their work as compared with that of more serious scholars 
and acted accordingly. The preface to Turbervile's Tragi- 
cal Tales throws some light on the author's idea of the com- 
parative values of translations. He thought of translating 
Lucan, but Melpomene appeared to warn him against so 
ambitious an enterprise, and admitting his unfitness for the 
task, he applied himself instead to this translation ^'out of 
sundry Italians." ^ Anthony Munday apologizes for his 
'' simple translation" of Palmerin d^Oliva by remarking that 
'Ho translate allows little occasion of fine pen work," ^ a 
comment which goes far to account for the doubtful quality 
of his productions in this field. 

Even when the translator of pleasant tales ranked his 
work high, it was generally on the ground that his readers 
would receive from it profit as well as amusement; he laid 
no claim to academic correctness. He mentioned or re- 
frained from mentioning his sources at his own discretion. 
Painter, in inaugurating the vogue of the novella, is ex- 
ceptionally careful in attributing each story to its author,^ 
but Whetstone's Rock of Regard contains no hint that it is 
translated, and The Petit Palace of Pettie his Pleasure con- 
veys the impression of original work. ''I dare not com- 
pare," runs the prefatory Letter to Gentlewomen Readers by 
R. B., 'Hhis work with the former Palaces of Pleasure, be- 
cause comparisons are odious, and because they contaia 
histories, translated out of grave authors and learned writers ; 
and this containeth discourses devised by a green youthful 

1 Title page, in Turbervile, Tragical Tales, Edinburgh, 1837. 

2 To the Reader, in Palmerin d'OUva, London, 1637. 

3 See Painter, Palace of Pleasure, ed. Jacobs, 1890. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 103 

capacity, and repeated in a manner extempore." ^ It was, 
again, the personal preference of the individual or the extent 
of his linguistic knowledge that determined whether the 
translator should employ the original Italian or Spanish 
versions of some collections or should content himself with 
an intermediary French rendering. Painter, accurate as he 
is in describing his sources, confesses that he has often used 
the French version of Boccaccio, though, or perhaps be- 
cause, it is less finely written than its original. Thomas 
Fortescue uses the French version for his translation of The 
Forest, a collection of histories '^ written in three sundry 
tongues, in the Spanish first by Petrus Mexia, and thence 
done into the Italian, and last into the French by Claudius 
Gringet, late citizen of Paris." ^ The most regrettable 
latitude of all, judging by theoretic standards of translation, 
was the careless freedom which writers of this group were 
inclined to appropriate. Anthony Munday, to take an ex- 
treme case, translating Palmerin of England from the French, 
makes a perfunctory apology in his Epistle Dedicatory for 
his inaccuracies: ''If you find the translation altered, or 
the true sense in some place of a matter impaired, let this 
excuse answer in default in that case. A work so large is 
sufficient to tire so simple a workman in himself. Beside 
the printer may in some place let an error escape." ^ Fortes- 
cue justifies, adequately enough, his omission of various 
tales by the plea that "the lack of one annoy eth not or 
maimeth not the other," but incidentally he throws light 
on the practice of others, less conscientious, who "add or 
change at their pleasure." 

There is perhaps danger of underrating the value of the 
theory which accompanies translations of this sort. The 
translators have left comparatively little comment on their 

1 The Petit Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, ed, Gollancz, 1908. 

2 Dedication. 

3 Palmerin of England, ed. Southey, London, 1807. 



104 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

methods, and it may be that now and then more satisfactory 
principles were imphcit. Yet even when the translator 
took his task seriously, his prefatory remarks almost always 
betrayed that there was something defective in his theory 
or careless in his execution. Bartholomew Young trans- 
lates Montemayor's Diana from the Spanish after a careful 
consideration of texts. '^Having compared the French 
copies with the Spanish original," he writes, ''I judge the 
first part to be exquisite, the other two corruptly done, with 
a confusion of verse into prose, and leaving out in many 
places divers hard sentences, and some leaves at the end 
of the third part, wherefore they are but blind guides of 
any to be imitated." ^ After this, unhappily, in the press 
of greater affairs he lets the work come from the printer 
unsupervised and presumably full of errors, 'Hhe copy being 
very dark and interlined, and I loath to write it out again." 
Robert Tofte addresses his Honoris Academy or the Famous 
Pastoral of the Fair Shepherdess Julietta "to the courteous 
and judicious reader and to none other"; he explains that 
he refuses to write for 'Hhe sottish multitude," that monster 
''who knows not when aught well is or amiss"; and blames 
''such idle thieves as do purloin from others' mint what's 
none of their own coin." ^ In spite of this, his preface 
makes no mention of Nicholas de Montreux, the original 
author, and if it were not for the phrase on the title page, 
"done into English," one would not suspect that the book 
was a translation. The apology of the printer, Thomas 
Creede, "Some faults no doubt there be, especially in the 
verses, and to speak truth, how could it be otherwise, 
when he wrote all this volume (as it were) cursorily and 
in haste, never having so much leisure as to overlook 
one leaf after he had scribbled the same," stamps Tofte 

1 Preface to divers learned gentlemen, in Diana of George of Monte- 
mayor, London, 1598. 

2 To the Reader, in Honor's Academy, London, 1610. 



I 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 105 

as perhaps a facile, but certainly not a conscientious 
workman. 

Another fashionable form of literature, the popular re- 
ligious or didactic work, was governed by standards of 
translation not unlike those which controlled the fictitious 
narrative. In the work of Lord Berners the romance had 
not yet made way fpr its more sophisticated rival, the no- 
vella. His translation from Guevara, however, marked the 
beginning of a new fashion. While Barclay's Ship of Fools 
and Mirror of Good Manners were addressed, like their 
medieval predecessors, to "lewd" people, with The Golden 
Book began the vogue of a new type of didactic literature, 
similar in its moral purpose and in its frequent employment 
of narrative material to the religious works of the Middle 
Ages, but with new stylistic elements that made their ap- 
peal, as did the novella, not to the rustic and unlearned, 
but to courtly readers. The prefaces to The Golden Book 
and to the translations which succeeded it throw little light 
on the theory of their authors, but what comment there is 
points to methods like those employed by the translators of 
the romance and the novella. Though later translators like 
Hellowes went to the original Spanish, Berners, Bryan, and 
North employ instead the intermediary French rendering. 
Praise of Guevara's style becomes a wearisome repetition of 
conventional phrases, a rhetorical exercise for the English 
writer rather than a serious attempt to analyze the pe- 
culiarities of the Spanish. Exaggeratedly typical is the 
comment of Hellowes in the 1574 edition of Guevara's 
Epistles, where he repeats with considerable complacency the 
commendation of the original work which was "contained 
in my former preface, as followeth. Being furnished so 
fully with sincere doctrine, so unused eloquence, so high 
a style, so apt similitudes, so excellent discourses, so 
convenient examples, so profound sentences, so old 
antiquities, so ancient histories, such variety of matter, 



106 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

so pleasant recreations, so strange things alleged, and 
certain parcels of Scripture with such dexterity handled, 
that it may hardly be discerned, whether shall be greater, 
either thy pleasure by reading, or profit by following 
the same." ^ 

Guevara himself was perhaps responsible for the failure 
of his translators to make any formal recognition of re- 
sponsibility for reproducing his style. His fictitious account 
of the sources of The Golden Book is medieval in tone. He 
has translated, not word for word, but thought for thought, 
and for the rudeness of his original he has substituted a 
more lofty style.^ His English translators reverse the latter 
process. Hellowes affirms that his translation of the 
Epistles '^goeth agreeable unto the Author thereof," but 
confesses that he wants ''both gloss and hue of rare elo- 
quence, used in the polishing of the rest of his works." 
North later translated from the French Amyot's epoch- 
making principle: ''the office of a fit translator consisteth 
not only in the faithful expressing of his author's meaning, 
but also in a certain resembhng and shadowing out of 
the form of his style and manner of his speaking," * 
but all that he has to say of his Dial of Princes is 
that he has reduced it into Enghsh "according to my 
small knowledge and tender years." ^ Here again, though 
the translator may sometimes have tried to adopt newer 
and more difficult standards, he does not make this expHcit 
in his comment. 

Obviously, however, academic standards of accuracy 
were not likely to make their first appearance in connection 

1 The Familiar Epistles of Sir Anthony of Guevara^ London, 1574, To 
the Reader. 

2 Prologue and Argument of Guevara, translated in North, Dial of 
Princes, 1619. 

' In North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, 1579. 
* Dedication in edition of 1568. 



I 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 107 

with fashionable court hterature; one expects to find them 
associated rather with the translations of the great classical 
literature, which Renaissance scholars approached with 
such enthusiasm and respect. One of the first of these, the 
translation of the Aeneid made by the Scotch poet, Gavin 
Douglas, appeared, like the translations of Barclay and 
Berners, in the early sixteenth century. Douglas's com- 
ment,^ which shows a good deal of conscious effort at defi- 
nition of the translator's duties, is an odd minghng of the 
medieval and the modern. He begins with a eulogy of 
Virgil couched in the undiscriminating, exaggerated terms 
of the previous period. Unlike the many medieval redac- 
tors of the Troy story, however, he does not assume the 
historian's hberty of selection and combination from a 
variety of sources. He regards Virgil as "a per se," and 
waxes indignant over Caxton's Eneydos, whose author rep- 
resented it as based on a French rendering of the great 
poet. It is, says Douglas, ''no more like than the devil 
and St. Austin." In proof of this he cites Caxton's treat- 
ment of proper names. Douglas claims, reasonably enough, 
that if he followed his original word for word, the result 
would be unintelligible, and he appeals to St. Gregory and 
Horace in support of this contention. All his plea, however, 
is for freedom rather than accuracy, and one scarcely knows 
how to interpret his profession of faithfulness: 

And thus I am constrenyt, as neir I may, 
To hald his vers & go nane other way, 
Les sum history, subtill word, or the ryme 
Causith me make digressione sum tyme. 

Yet whether or not Douglas's ''digressions" are permissible, 
such renderings as he illustrates involve no more latitude 
than is sanctioned by the schoolboy's Latin Granmiar. 
He is disturbed by the necessity for using more words in 

^ Prologue to Book I, Aeneid, reprinted Bannatyne Club. 



108 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

English than the Latin has, and he feels it incumbent upon 
him to explain, 

. . . sum tyme of a word I mon mak thre, 
In witness of this term oppetere. 

English, he says in another place, cannot without the use 
of additional words reproduce the difference between syn- 
onymous terms like animal and homo; genus, sexus, and 
species; ohjectum and suhjectum; arhor and lignum. Such 
conoment, interesting because definite, is nevertheless no 
more significant than that which had appeared in the Purvey 
preface to the Bible more than a hundred years earlier. 
One is reminded that most of the material which the present- 
day translator finds in grammars of foreign languages was 
not yet in existence in any generally accessible form. 

Such elementary aids were, however, in process of formu- 
lation during the sixteenth century. Mr. Foster Watson 
quotes from an edition of Mancinus, published as early 
probably as 1520, the following directions for putting Latin 
into English: ''Whoso will learn to turn Latin into English, 
let him first take of the easiest Latin, and when he under- 
standeth clearly what the Latin meaneth, let him say the 
English of every Latin word that way, as the sentence may 
appear most clearly to his ear, and where the English of the 
Latin words of the text will not make the sentence fair, 
let him take the Enghsh of those Latin words by whom 
(which) the Latin words of the text should be expounded 
and if that (they) will not be enough to make the sentence 
perfect, let him add more English, and that not only 
words, but also when need requireth, whole clauses such 
as will agree best to the sentence." ^ By the new 
methods of study advocated by men like Cheke and 

^ Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660, Cambridge, 
1908, pp. 405-6. 




THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 109 

Ascham translation as practiced by students must have 
become a much more intelhgent process, and the Uterary 
man who had received such preparatory training must 
have reahzed that variations from the original such as 
had troubled Douglas needed no apology, but might be 
taken for granted. 

Further help was offered to students in the shape of 
various literal translations from the classics. The trans- 
lator of Seneca's Hercules Fur ens undertook the work 'Ho 
conduct by some means to further understanding the un- 
ripened scholars of this realm to whom I thought it should 
be no less thankful for me to interpret some Latin work into 
this our own tongue than for Erasmus in Latin to expound 
the Greek." ^ "Neither could I satisfy myself," he con- 
tinues, 'Hill I had throughout this whole tragedy of Seneca 
so travailed that I had in English given verse for verse (as 
far as the English tongue permits) and word for word the 
Latin, whereby I might both make some trial of myself and 
as it were teach the little children to go that yet can but 
creep." Abraham Fleming, translating Virgil's Georgics 
"grammatically," expresses his original "in plain words 
applied to blunt capacities, considering the expositor's 
drift to consist in delivering a direct order of construction 
for the relief of weak grammatists, not in attempting by 
curious device and disposition to content courtly humanists, 
whose desire he hath been more willing at this time to sus- 
pend, because he would in some exact sort satisfy such as 
need the supply of his travail." ^ William Bullokar pref- 
aces his translation of Esop's Fables with the words: "I 
have translated out of Latin into English, but not in the 
best phrase of English, though Enghsh be capable of the 
perfect sense thereof, and might be used in the best phrase, 

^ Dedication, in Spearing, The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca's 
Tragedies, Cambridge, 1912. 

2 To the Reader, in The Georgics translated by A. F., London, 1589. 



110 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

had not my care been to keep it somewhat nearer the Latin 
phrase, that the Enghsh learner of Latin, reading over 
these authors in both languages, might the more easily 
confer them together in their sense, and the better under- 
stand the one by the other: and for that respect of easy 
conference, I have kept the like course in my translation 
of TuUy's Offices out of Latin into English to be imprinted 
shortly also." ^ 

Text books hke these, valuable and necessary as they 
were, can scarcely claim a place in the history of literature. 
Bullokar himself, recognizing this, promises that "if God 
lend me hfe and ability to translate any other author into 
English hereafter, I will bend myself to follow the excellency 
of English in the best plirase thereof, more than I will bend 
it to the phrases of the language to be translated." In 
avoiding the overliteral method, however, the translator of 
the classics sometimes assumed a regrettable freedom, not 
only with the words but with the substance of his source. 
With regard to his translation of the Aeneid Phaer repre- 
sents himself as "Trusting that you, my right worshipful 
masters and students of universities and such as be teachers 
of children and readers of this author in Latin, will not be 
too much offended though every verse answer not to your 
expectation. For (besides the diversity between a con- 
struction and a translation) you know there be many mys- 
tical secrets in this writer, which uttered in English would 
show little pleasure and in my opinion are better to be un- 
touched than to diminish the grace of the rest with tedious- 
ness and darkness. I have therefore followed the counsel 
of Horace, touching the duty of a good interpreter. Qui 
quae desperat nitescere posse, relinquit, by which occasion 
somewhat I have in places omitted, somewhat altered, and 
some things I have expounded, and all to the ease of inferior 

1 Preface, reprinted in Plessow, Fdbeldichtung in England, Berlin, 
1906. 



I 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 111 

readers, for you that are learned need not to be in- 
structed." ^ Though Jasper Heywood's version of Her- 
cules Furens is an example of the literal translation for the 
use of students, most of the other members of the group of 
young men who in 1581 published their translations of 
Seneca protest that they have reproduced the meaning, not 
the words of their author. Alexander Neville, a precocious 
youth who translated the fifth tragedy in "this sixteenth 
year of mine age," determined "not to be precise in follow- 
ing the author word for word, but sometimes by addition, 
sometimes by subtraction, to use the aptest phrases in giv- 
ing the sense that I could invent." ^ Neville's translation 
is "oftentimes rudely increased with mine own simple in- 
vention";^ John Studley has changed the first chorus of 
the Medea, "because in it I saw nothing but an heap of 
profane stories and names of profane idols";* Hey wood 
himself, since the existing text of the Troas is imperfect, 
admits having "with addition of mine own pen supplied 
the want of some things," ^ and says that he has also re- 
placed the third chorus, because much of it is "heaped 
number of far and strange countries." Most radical of all 
is the theory according to which Thomas Drant translated 
the Satires of Horace. That Drant could be faithful even 
to excess is evident from his preface to The Wailings of 
Jeremiah included in the same volume with his version of 
Horace. "That thou mightest have this rueful parcel of 
Scripture pure and sincere, not swerved or altered, I laid it 
to the touchstone, the native tongue. I weighed it with the 

1 Conclusion, edition of 1573. 

2 Seneca His Ten Tragedies, 1581, Dedication of Fifth. 
' To the Reader. 

* Agamemnon and Medea from edition of 1556, ed. Spearing, 1913, 
Preface of Medea. 

5 To the Readers, prefixed to Troas, in Spearing, The Elizabethan 
Translations of Seneca's Tragedies. 



112 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Chaldee Targum and the Septuaginta. I desired to jump 
so nigh with the Hebrew, that it doth erewhile deform the 
vein of the Enghsh, the proprieties of that language and 
ours being in some speeches so much dissemblable." But 
with Horace Drant pursues a different course. As a moral- 
ist it is justifiable for him to translate Horace because the 
Latin poet satirizes that wickedness which Jeremiah mourned 
over. Horace's satire, however, is not entirely applicable to 
conditions in England; ''he never saw that with the view of 
his eye which his pensive translator cannot but overview 
with the languish of his soul." Moreover Horace's style is 
capable of improvement, an improvement which Drant is 
quite ready to provide. ''His eloquence is sometimes too 
sharp, and therefore I have blunted it, and sometimes too 
dull, and therefore I have whetted it, helping him to ebb 
and helping him to rise." With his reader Drant is equally 
high-handed. ''I dare not warrant the reader to under- 
stand him in all places," he writes, ''no more than he did 
me. Howbeit I have made him more Hghtsome well nigh 
by one half (a small accomplishment for one of my con- 
tinuance) and if thou canst not now in all points perceive 
him (thou must bear with me) in sooth the default is thine 
own." After this one is somewhat prepared for Drant 's 
remarkable summary of his methods. "First I have now 
done as the people of God were commanded to do with their 
captive women that were handsome and beautiful: I have 
shaved off his hair and pared off his nails, that is, I have 
wiped away all his vanity and superfluity of matter. Fur- 
ther, I have for the most part drawn his private carpings of 
this or that man to a general moral. I have Englished 
things not according to the vein of the Latin propriety, but 
of his own vulgar tongue. I have interfered (to remove his 
obscurity and sometimes to better his matter) much of mine 
own devising. I have pieced his reason, eked and mended 
his similitudes, mollified his hardness, prolonged his cortall 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 113 

kind of speeches, changed and much altered his words, but 
not his sentence, or at least (I dare say) not his purpose." ^ 
Even the novella does not afford examples of such deliberate 
justification of undue liberty with source. 

Why such a situation existed may be partially explained. 
The Elizabethan writer was almost as slow as his medieval 
predecessor to make distinctions between different kinds of 
literature. Both the novella and the epic might be classed 
as ^4iistories," and '^histories" were valuable because they 
aided the reader in the actual conduct of life. Arthur 
Golding tells in the preface to his translation of Justin the 
story of how Alexander the Great "coming into a school 
and finding not Homer's works there . . . gave the master 
a buffet with his fist: meaning that the knowledge of His- 
tories was a thing necessary to all estates and degrees." ^ 
It was the content of a work that was most important, and 
comment like that of Drant makes us realize how persistent 
was the conception that such content was common property 
which might be adjusted to the needs of different readers. 
The lesser freedoms of the translator were probably largely 
due to the difficulties inherent in a metrical rendering. It 
is "ryme" that partially accounts for some of Douglas's 
"digressions." Seneca's Hercules Furens, literal as the 
translation purports to be, is reproduced "verse for verse, 
as far as the English tongue permits." Thomas Twyne, who 
completed the work which Phaer began, calls attention to 
the difficulty "in this kind of translation to enforce their 
rime to another man's meaning." ^ Edward Hake, it is not 

1 A Medidnable Moral, that is, the two books of Horace his satires 
Englished acccording to the prescription of St. Hierome, London, 1566, 
To the Reader. 

2 Preface to the Earl of Oxford, in The Abridgment of the Histories of 
Trogus Pompeius collected and written in the Latin tongue by Justin, 
London, 1563. 

3 To the Gentle Reader, in Phaer's Virgil, 1583. 



114 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

unlikely, expresses a common idea when he gives as one of 
his reasons for employing verse rather than prose "that 
prose requireth a more exact labor than metre doth." ^ If 
one is to believe Abraham Fleming, one of the adherents of 
Gabriel Harvey, matters may be improved by the adoption 
of classical metres. Fleming has translated Virgil's Bucolics 
and Georgics "not in foolish rhyme, the nice observance 
whereof many times darkeneth, corrupteth, perverteth, and 
falsifieth both the sense and the signification, but with due 
proportion and measure." ^ 

Seemingly, however, the translators who advocated the 
employment of the hexameter made little use of the argu- 
ment that to do so made it possible to reproduce the original 
more faithfully. Stany hurst, who says that in his transla- 
tion of the first four books of the Aeneid he is carrying out 
Ascham's wish that the university students should "apply 
their wits in beautifying our English language with heroical 
verses," chooses Virgil as the subject of his experiment for 
"his peerless style and matchless stuff," ^ leaving his reader 
with the impression that the claims of his author were 
probably subordinate in the translator's mind to his in- 
terest in Ascham's theories. Possibly he shared his master's 
belief that "even the best translation is for mere necessity 
but an evil imped wing to fly withal, or a heavy stump leg 
of wood to go withal." ^ In discussion of the style to be 
employed in the metrical rendering there was the same 
failure to make explicit the connection between the original 
and the translation. Many critics accepted the principle 

1 Epistle Dedicatory to A Compendious Form of Living, quoted in 
Introduction to News out of Powles Churchyard, reprinted London, 1872, 

p. XXX. 

2 The Bucolics of Virgil together with his Georgics, London, 1589, The 
Argument. 

3 Preface in Gregory Smith, vol. 1, p. 137. 

4 The Schoolmaster, in Works, London, 1864, vol. 3, p. 226. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 115 

that '^ decorum" of style was essential in the translation of 
certain kinds of poetry, but they based their demand for 
this quality on its extrinsic suitability much more than on 
its presence in the work to be translated. In Turbervile's 
elaborate comment on the style which he has used in his 
translation of the Eclogues of Mantuan, there is the same 
baffling vagueness in his references to the quality of the 
original that is felt in the prefaces of Lydgate and Caxton. 
''Though I have altered the tongue," he says, "1 trust I 
have not changed the author's meaning or sense in anjrthing, 
but played the part of a true interpreter, observing that we 
call Decorum in each respect, as far as the poet's and our 
mother tongue will give me leave. For as the conference 
between shepherds is familiar stuff and homely, so have I 
shaped my style and tempered it with such common and 
ordinary phrase of speech as countrymen do use in their 
affairs ; alway minding the saying of Horace, whose sentence 
I have thus Englished: 

To set a manly head upon a horse's neck 

And all the limbs with divers plumes of divers hue to deck, 

Or paint a woman's face aloft to open show, 

And make the picture end in fish with scaly skin below, 

I think (my friends) would cause you laugh and smile to see 

How ill these ill-compacted things and numbers would agree. 

For indeed he that shall translate a shepherd's tale and use 
the talk and style of an heroical personage, expressing the 
silly man's meaning with lofty thundering words, in my 
simple judgment joins (as Horace saith) a horse's neck and 
a man's head together. For as the one were monstrous to 
see, so were the other too fond and foolish to read. Where- 
fore I have (I say) used the common country phrase ac- 
cording to the person of the speakers in every Eclogue, as 
though indeed the man himself should tell his tale. If 
there be anything herein that thou shalt happen to mistake, 
neither blame the learned poet, nor control the clownish 



116 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

shepherd (good reader) but me that presumed rashly to 
offer so unworthy matter to thy survey." ^ Another phase 
of "decorum/' the necessity for employing a lofty style in 
dealing with the affairs of great persons, comes in for dis- 
cussion in connection with translations of Seneca and Virgil. 
Jasper Heywood makes his excuses in case his translation 
of the Troas has "not kept the royalty of speech meet for 
a tragedy"; ^ Stanyhurst praises Phaer for his "picked and 
lofty words"; ^ but he himself is blamed by Puttenham be- 
cause his own words lack dignity. "In speaking or writing 
of a prince's affairs and fortunes," writes Puttenham, 
"there is a certain decorum, that we may not use the same 
terms in their business as we might very well do in a meaner 
person's, the case being all one, such reverence is due to 
their estates." * He instances Stanyhurst's renderings, 
"Aeneas was fain to trudge out of Troy" and "what moved 
Juno to tug so great a captain as Aeneas," and declares that 
the term trudge is "better to be spoken of a beggar, or of a 
rogue, or of a lackey," and that the word tug "spoken in 
this case is so undecent as none other could have been de- 
vised, and took his first original from the cart." A similar 
objection to the employment of a "plain" style in telling 
the Troy story was made, it will be remembered, in the early 
fifteenth century by Wyntoun. 

The matter of decorum was to receive further attention 
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, 
however, the comment associated with verse translations 
does not anticipate that of later times and is scarcely more 
significant than that which accompanies the novella. So 
long, indeed, as the theory of translation was so largely 

^ To the Reader, prefixed to translation of Eclogues of Mantuan, 
1567. 

2 To the Reader, in The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca's Tragedies. 

^ Stanyhurst's Aeneid, in Arber's Scholar's Library, p. 5. 

* Ibid., Introduction, p. xix, quoted from The Art of English Poesy. 




THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 117 

concerned with the claims of the reader, there was little 
room for initiative. It was no mark of originality to say 
that the translation must be profitable or entertaining, clear 
and easily understood; these rules had already been laid 
down by generations of translators. The real opportunity 
for a fresh, individual approach to the problems of transla- 
tion lay in consideration of the claims of the original author. 
Renaissance scholarship was bringing a new knowledge of 
texts and authors and encouraging a new alertness of mind 
in approaching texts written in foreign languages. It was 
now possible, while making faithfulness to source obligatory 
instead of optional, to put the matter on a reasonable basis. 
The most vigorous and suggestive comment came from a 
small number of men of scholarly tastes and of active minds, 
who brought to the subject both learning and enthusiasm, 
and who were not content with vague, conventional forms 
of words. 

It was prose rather than verse renderings that occupied 
the attention of these theorists, and in the works which they 
chose for translation the intellectual was generally stronger 
than the artistic appeal. Their translations, however, 
showed a variety peculiarly characteristic of the English 
Renaissance. Interest in classical scholarship was nearly 
always associated with interest in the new religious doc- 
trines, and hence the new theories of translation were at- 
tached impartially either to renderings of the classics or to 
versions of contemporary theological works, valuable on 
account of the close, careful thinking which they contained, 
as contrasted with the more superficial charm of writings 
like those of Guevara. An Elizabethan scholar, indeed, 
might have hesitated if asked which was the more im- 
portant, the Greek or Latin classic or the theological treatise. 
Nash praises Golding indiscriminately ^'for his industrious 
toil in Englishing Ovid's Metamorphoses, besides many 
other exquisite editions of divinity turned by him out of the 



118 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

French tongue into our own.'' ^ Golding himself, translat 
ing one of these "exquisite editions of divinity," Calvin's 
Sermons on the Book of Job, insists so strongly on the "sub- 
stance, importance, and travail" ^ which belong to the work 
that one is ready to beUeve that he ranked it higher than 
any of his other translations. Nor was the contribution 
from this field to be despised. Though the translation of 
the Bible was an isolated task which had few relations with 
other forms of translation, what few affiliations it developed 
were almost entirely with theological works like those of 
Erasmus, Melanchthon, Calvin, and to the translation of 
such writings Biblical standards of accuracy were trans- 
ferred. On the other hand the translator of Erasmus or 
Calvin was likely to have other and very different inter- 
ests, which did much to save him from a narrow pedantry. 
Nicholas Udall, for example, who had a large share in the 
translation of Erasmus's Paraphrase on the New Testament, 
also translated parts of Terence and is best known as the 
author of Ralph Roister Bolster. Thomas Norton, who 
translated Calvin's Institution of the Christian Religion, has 
been credited with a share in Gorhoduc. 

It was towards the middle of the century that these trans- 
lators began to formulate their views, and probably the 
decades immediately before and after the accession of 
Elizabeth were more fruitful in theory than any other part 
of the period. Certain centers of influence may be rather 
clearly distinguished. In contemporary references to the 
early part of the century Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir Thomas 
More are generally coupled together as authorities on trans- 
lation. Slightly later St. John's College, Cambridge, "that 
most famous and fortunate nurse of all learning," ^ exerted 
through its masters and students a powerful influence. 

1 Preface to Greene's Menaphoriym Gregory Smith, vol. 1, p. 315. 

2 Dedication, dated 1573, in edition of 1584. 

3 Gregory Smith, vol. 1, p. 313. 



I 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 119 

Much of the fame of the college was due to Sir John Cheke, 
"a, man of men," according to Nash, ''supernaturally 
traded in all tongues." Cheke is associated, in one way 
and another, with an odd variety of translations — Nicholls' 
translation of a French version of Thucydides,^ Hoby's 
Courtier,^ Wilson's Demosthenes ^ — suggesting something of 
the range of his sympathies. Though little of his own com- 
ment survives, the echoes of his opinions in Ascham's School- 
master and the preface to Wilson's Demosthenes make one 
suspect that his teaching was possibly the strongest force 
at work at the time to produce higher standards for trans- 
lation. As the century progressed Sir William Cecil, in his 
early days a distinguished student at St. John's and an inti- 
mate associate of Cheke's, maintained, in spite of the cares of 
state, the tradition of his college as the patron of various trans- 
lators and the recipient of numerous dedications prefixed 
to their productions. It is from the midcentury translators, 
however, that the most distinctive comment emanates. 
United in various combinations, now by religious sympa- 
thies, now by a common enthusiasm for learning, now by the 
influence of an individual, they form a group fairly homo- 
geneous so far as their theories of translation are concerned, 
appreciative of academic correctness, but ready to consider 
also the claims of the reader and the nature of the vernacular. 
The earlier translators, Elyot and More, have left small 
but significant comment on methods. More's expression 
of theory was elicited by Tyndale's translation of the Bible; 
of the technical difficulties involved in his own translation 
of The Life of Pico delta Mirandola he says nothing. Elyot 
is one of the first translators to approach his task from a 
new angle. Translating from Greek to English, he ob- 
served, like Tyndale, the differences and correspondences 

1 Dedicated to Cheke. 

2 See Cheke's Letter in The Courtier, Tudor Translations, London, 
1900. * See Epistle prefixed to translation. 



120 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

between the two languages. His Doctrinal of Princes was 
translated ^Ho the intent only that I would assay if our 
English tongue might receive the quick and proper sentences 
pronounced by the Greeks." ^ The experiment had inter- 
esting results. "And in this experience," he continues, "I 
have found (if I be not much deceived) that the form of 
speaking, called in Greek and also in English Phrasis, much 
nearer approacheth to that which at this day we use, than 
the order of the Latin tongue. I mean in the sentences 
and not in the words." 

A peculiarly good exponent of the new vitality which was 
taking possession of the theory of translation is Nicholas 
Udall, whose opinions have been already cited in this chap- 
ter. The versatility of intellect evinced by the list of his 
varied interests, dramatic, academic, religious, showed it- 
self also in his views regarding translation. In the various 
prefaces and dedications which he contributed to the trans- 
lation of Erasmus's Paraphrase he touches on problems of 
all sorts — stipends for translators, the augmentation of 
the English vocabulary, sentence structure in translation, 
the style of Erasmus, the individual quality in the style of 
every writer — but all these questions he treats lightly and 
undogmatically. Translation, according to Udall, should 
not conform to iron rules. He is not disturbed by the 
diversity of methods exhibited in the Paraphrase. "Though 
every translator," he writes, "follow his own vein in turn- 
ing the Latin into English, yet doth none willingly swerve 
or dissent from the mind and sense of his author, albeit 
some go more near to the words of the author, and some use 
the liberty of translating at large, not so precisely binding 
themselves to the strait interpretation of every word and 
syllable." ^ In his own share of the translation Udall in- 
clines rather to the free than to the literal method. He 

^ Quoted in Life prefixed to The Governor, ed. Croft. 
2 Address to Queen Katherine prefixed to Paraphrase. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 121 

has not been able "fully to discharge the office of a good 
translator," ^ partly because of the ornate quality of Eras- 
mus's style, partly because he wishes to be understood by 
the unlearned. He does not feel so scrupulous as he would 
if he were translating the text of Scripture, though even in 
the latter connection he is guilty of the heretical opinion 
that "if the translators were not altogether so precise as 
they are, but had some more regard to expressing of the 
sense, I think in my judgment they should do better." 
It will be noted, however, that UdalFs advocacy of freedom 
is an individual reaction, not the repetition of a formula. 
The preface to his translation of the Apophthegmes of Eras- 
mus helps to redress the balance in favor of accuracy. "I 
have labored," he says, "to discharge the duty of a trans- 
lator, that is, keeping and following the sense of my book, 
to interpret and turn the Latin into English, with as much 
grace of our vulgar tongue as in my slender power and 
knowledge hath lain." ^ The rest of the preface shows that 
Udall, in his concern for the quality of the English, did not 
make "following the sense" an excuse for undue liberties. 
Writing "with a regard for young scholars and students, 
who get great value from comparing languages," he is most 
careful to note such slight changes and omissions as he has 
made in the text. Explanations and annotations have 
been printed "in a small letter with some directory mark," 
and "any Greek or Latin verse or word, whereof the pith 
and grace of the saying dependeth" has been retained, a 
sacrifice to scholarship for which he apologizes to the un- 
learned reader. 

Nicholas Grimald, who published his translation of 
Cicero's Offices shortly after the accession of Elizabeth, is 
much more dogmatic in his rules for translation than is 

^ Address to Katherine prefixed to Luke. 

2 To the Reader, in edition of 1564, literally reprinted Boston, 
Lincolnshire, 1877. 



122 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

UdalL '^Howbeit look," runs the preface, ''what rule the 
Rhetorician gives in precept, to be observed of an Orator 
in telling of his tale: that it be short, and without idle 
words: that it be plain, and without dark sense: that it 
be provable, and without any swerving from the truth: the 
same rule should be used in examining and judging of trans- 
lation. For if it be not as brief as the very author's text 
requireth, what so is added to his perfect style shall appear 
superfluous, and to serve rather to the making of some para- 
phrase or commentary. Thereto if it be uttered with ink- 
horn terms, and not with usual words: or if it be phrased 
with wrested or far-fetched forms of speech, not fair but 
harsh, not easy but hard, not natural but violent it shall 
seem to be. Then also, in case it yield not the meaning of 
the author, but either following fancy or misled by error 
forsakes the true pattern, it cannot be approved for a faith- 
ful and sure interpretation, which ought to be taken for the 
greatest praise of all." ^ In Grimald's insistence on a brev- 
ity equal to that of the original and in his unmodified op- 
position to innovations in vocabulary, there is something of 
pedantic narrowness. His criticism of Cicero is not il- 
luminating and his estimate, in this connection, of his own 
accomplishment is amusingly complacent. In Cicero's 
work "marvellous is the matter, flowing the eloquence, 
rich the store of stuff, and full artificial the enditing: but 
how I," he continues, ''have expressed the same, the more 
the book be perused, the better it may chance to appear. 
None other translation in our tongue have I seen but one, 
which is of all men of any learning so well liked that they 
repute it and consider it as none: yet if ye list to compare 
this somewhat with that nothing, peradventure this some- 
what will serve somewhat the more." Yet in spite of his 
limitations Grimald has some breadth of outlook. A work 

1 To the Reader, in Marcus Tullius Cicero's Three Books of Duties, 
1558. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 123 

like his own, he beheves, can help the reader to a greater 
command of the vernacular. ''Here is for him occasion 
both to whet his wit and also to file his tongue. For al- 
though an Englishman hath his mother tongue and can 
talk apace as he learned of his dame, yet is it one thing to 
tittle tattle, I wot iiot how, or to chatter like a jay, and 
another to bestow his words wisely, orderly, pleasantly, 
and pithily." The writer knows men who could speak Latin 
"readily and well-favoredly, who to have done as much in 
our language and to have handled the same matter, would 
have been half black." Careful study of this translation 
will help a man "as well in the English as the Latin, to 
weigh well properties of words, fashions of phrases, and the 
ornaments of both." 

Another interesting document is the preface entitled The 
Translator to the Reader which appeared in 1578 in the 
fourth edition of Thomas Norton's translation of Calvin's 
Institution of the Christian Religion. The opinions which it 
contains took shape some years earlier, for the author ex- 
pressly states that the translation has not been changed at 
all from what it was in the first impression, published in 
1561, and that the considerations which he now formulates 
governed him in the beginning. Norton, like Grimald, in- 
sists on extreme accuracy in following the original, but he 
bases his demand on a truth largely ignored by translators 
up to this time, the essential relationship between thought 
and style. He makes the following surprisingly penetra- 
tive comment on the nature and significance of Calvin's 
Latin style: "I considered how the author thereof had of 
long time purposely labored to write the same most ex- 
actly, and to pack great plenty of matter in small room of 
words, yea and those so circumspectly and precisely ordered, 
to avoid the cavillations of such, as for enmity to the truth 
therein contained, would gladly seek and abuse all advan- 
tages which might be found by any oversight in penning of 



124 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

it, that the sentences were thereby become so full as nothing 
might well be added without idle superfluity, and again so 
nighly pared that nothing might be minished without 
taking away some necessary substance of matter therein 
expressed. This manner of writing, beside the peculiar 
terms of arts and figures, and the difficulty of the matters 
themselves, being throughout interlaced with the school- 
men's controversies, made a great hardness in the author's 
own book, in that tongue wherein otherwise he is both 
plentiful and easy, insomuch that it sufficeth not to read 
him once, unless you can be content to read in vain." Then 
follows Norton's estimate of the translator's duty in such a 
case: "1 durst not presume to warrant myself to have his 
meaning without his words. And they that wot well what * 
it is to translate well and faithfully, specially in matters of 
religion, do know that not only the grammatical construc- 
tion of words sufficeth, but the very building and order to 
observe all advantages of vehemence or grace, by placing 
or accent of words, maketh much to the true setting forth 
of a writer's mind." Norton, however, did not entirely 
forget his readers. He approached his task with ''great 
doubtfulness," fully conscious of the dilemma involved. 
*'If I should follow the words, I saw that of necessity the 
hardness of the translation must needs be greater than was 
in the tongue wherein it was originally written. If I should 
leave the course of words, and grant myself hberty after 
the natural manner of my own tongue, to say that in Eng- 
lish which I conceived to be his meaning in Latin, I plainly 
perceived how hardly I might escape error." In the end 
he determined 'Ho follow the words so near as the phrase 
of the English tongue would suffer me." Unhappily Nor- 
ton, like Grimald and like some of the translators of the 
Bible, has an exaggerated regard for brevity. He claims 
that "if the English book were printed in such paper and 
letter as the Latin is, it should not exceed the Latin in 




I 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 125 

quantity," and that students ^' shall not find any more 
English than shall suffice to construe the Latin withal, 
except in such few places where the great difference of the 
phrases of the languages enforced me." Yet he believes 
that his version is not unnecessarily hard to understand, 
and he urges readers who have found it difficult to ''read 
it ofter, in which doing you shall find (as many have con- 
fessed to me that they have found by experience) that 
those things which at first reading shall displease you for 
hardness shall be found so easy as so hard matter would 
suffer, and for the most part more easy than some other 
phrase which should with greater looseness and smoother 
sliding away deceive your understanding." 

Thomas Wilson, who dedicated his translation of Dem- 
osthenes to Sir William Cecil in 1570, links himself with 
the earlier group of translators by his detailed references 
to Cheke. Like Norton he is very conscious of the difficulty 
of translation. "I never found in my life," he writes of 
this piece of work, ''anything so hard for me to do." "Such 
a hard thing it is," he adds later, "to bring matter out of 
any one language into another." A vigorous advocate of 
translation, however, he does not despise his own tongue. 
"The cunning is no less," he declares, "and the praise as 
great in my judgment, to translate anything excellently 
into English, as into any other language," and he hopes 
that, if his own attempt proves unsuccessful, others will 
make the trial, "that such an orator as this is might be so 
framed to speak our tongue as none were able to amend 
him, and that he might be found to be most like himself." 
Wilson comes to his task with all the equipment that the 
period could afford; his preface gives evidence of a critical 
acquaintance with numerous Latin renderings of his author. 
From Cheke, however, he has gained something more 
valuable, the power to feel the vital, permanent quality in 
the work of Demosthenes. Cheke, he says, "was moved 



126 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

greatly to like Demosthenes above all others, for that he 
saw him so familiarly applying himself to the sense and 
understanding of the common people, that he sticked not 
to say that none ever was more fit to make an Englishman 
tell his tale praiseworthily in any open hearing either in 
parliament or in pulpit or otherwise, than this only orator 
was." Wilson shares this opinion and, representative of 
the changing standards of Elizabethan scholarship, prefers 
Demosthenes to Cicero. ''Demosthenes used a plain, 
familiar manner of writing and speaking in all his actions," 
he says in his Preface to the Reader, " applying himself to 
the people's nature and to their understanding without 
using of proheme to win credit or devising conclusion to 
move affections and to purchase favor after he had done his 
matters. . . . And were it not better and more wisdom to 
speak plainly and nakedly after the common sort of men in 
few words, than to overflow with unnecessary and super- 
fluous eloquence as Cicero is thought sometimes to do." 
''Never did glass so truly represent man's face," he writes 
later, "as Demosthenes doth show the world to us, and as 
it was then, so is it now, and will be so still, till the con- 
summation and end of all things shall be." From Cheke 
Wilson has received also training in methods of translation 
and especially in the handling of the vernacular. "Master 
Cheke's judgment was great," he recalls, "in translating 
out of one tongue into another, and better skill he had in 
our English speech to judge of the phrases and properties 
of words and to divide sentences than any one else that I 
have known. And often he would English his matters out 
of the Latin or Greek upon the sudden, by looking of the 
book only, without reading or construing anything at all, 
an usage right worthy and very profitable for all men, as 
well for the understanding of the book, as also for the apt- 
ness of framing the author's meaning, and bettering thereby 
their judgment, and therewithal perfecting their tongue and 



I 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 127 

utterance of speech." In speaking of his own methods, 
however, Wilson's emphasis is on his faithfulness to the 
original. ''But perhaps," he writes, ''whereas I have been 
somewhat curious to follow Demosthenes' natural phrase, 
it may be thought that I do speak over bare English. Well 
I had rather follow his vein, the which was to speak simply 
and plainly to the common people's understanding, than 
to overflourish with superfluous speech, although I might 
thereby be counted equal with the best that ever wrote 
English." 

Though now and then the comment of these men is 
slightly vague or inconsistent, in general they describe their 
methods clearly and fully. Other translators, expressing 
themselves with less sureness and adequacy, leave the im- 
pression that they have adopted similar standards. Trans- 
lations, for example, of Calvin's Commentary on Acts ^ 
and Luther's Commentary on Galatians ^ are described on 
their title pages as "faithfully translated" from the Latin. 
B. R.'s preface to his translation of Herodotus, though its 
meaning is somewhat obscured by rhetoric, suggests a 
suitable regard for the original. "Neither of these," he 
writes of the two books which he has completed, "are 
braved out in their colors as the use is nowadays, and yet 
so seemly as either you will love them because they are 
modest, or not mislike them because they are not impudent, 
since in refusing idle pearls to make them seem gaudy, they 
reject not modest apparel to cause them to go comely. 
The truth is (Gentlemen) in making the new attire, I was 
fain to go by their old array, cutting out my cloth by an- 
other man's measure, being great difference whether we 
invent a fashion of our own, or imitate a pattern set down 
by another. Which I speak not to this end, for that my- 
self could have done more eloquently than our author hath 

^ Translated by Christopher Featherstone, reprinted, Edinburgh, 
1844. 2 London, 1577. 



128 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

in Greek, but that the course of his writing being most 
sweet in Greek, converted into Enghsh loseth a great part 
of his grace." ^ Outside of the field of theology or of clas- 
sical prose there were translators who strove for accuracy. 
Hoby, profiting doubtless by his association with Cheke, 
endeavored in translating The Courtier 'Ho follow the very 
meaning and words of the author, without being misled 
by fantasy, or leaving out any parcel one or other." ^ 
Robert Peterson claims that his version of Delia Casa's 
Galateo is ''not cunningly but faithfully translated." ^ The 
printer of Carew's translation of Tasso explains: "In that 
which is done, I have caused the Itahan to be printed to- 
gether with the English, for the dehght and benefit of those 
gentlemen that love that most hvely language. And 
thereby the learned reader shall see how strict a course the 
translator hath tied himself in the whole work, usurping as 
little liberty as any whatsoever as ever wrote with any 
commendations." ^ Even translators who do not profess to 
be overfaithful display a consciousness of the existence of 
definite standards of accuracy. Thomas Chaloner, another 
of the friends of Cheke, translating Erasmus's Praise of 
Folly for "mean men of baser wits and condition," chooses 
"to be counted a scant true interpreter." "I have not 
pained myself," he says, "to render word for word, nor 
proverb for proverb . . . which may be thought by some 
cunning translators a deadly sin." ^ To the author of the 
Menechmi the word "translation" has a distinct connota- 
tion. The printer of the work has found him "very loath 
and unwilling to hazard this to the curious view of envious 

* To the Gentlemen Readers, in Herodotus, translated by B. R., London, 
1584. 2 Qjp^ cit. 

' Dedication, in edition of 1576, reprinted, ed. Spingarn, Boston, 
1914. 

* Preface, in Godfrey of Bulloigne, London, 1594, reprinted in Grosart, 
Occasional Issues, 1881. ^ To the Reader, in edition of 1549. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 129 

detraction, being (as he tells me) neither so exactly written 
as it may carry any name of translation, nor such liberty 
therein used as that he would notoriously differ from the 
poet's own order." ^ Richard KnoUes, whose translation of 
Bodin's Six Books of a Commonweal was published in 1606, 
employed both the French and the Latin versions of the 
treatise, and describes himself as on this account ''seeking 
therein the true sense and meaning of the author, rather 
than precisely following the strict rules of a nice trans- 
lator, in observing the very words of the author." ^ The 
translators of this later time, however, seldom put into 
words theories so scholarly as those formulated earlier in 
the period, when, even though the demand for accuracy 
might sometimes be exaggerated, it was nevertheless the 
result of thoughtful discrimination. There was some 
reason why a man like Gabriel Harvey, living towards the 
end of Elizabeth's reign, should look back with regret to 
the time when England produced men like Cheke and his 
contemporaries .^ 

One must frequently remind oneself, however, that the 
absence of expressed theory need not involve the absence 
of standards. Among translators as among original writers 
a fondness for analyzing and describing processes did not 
necessarily accompany literary skill. Much more activity 
of mind and respect for originals may have existed among 
verse translators than is evident from their scanty com- 
ment. The most famous prose translators have little to say 
about their methods. Golding, who produced so much both 
in verse and prose, and who usually wrote prefaces to his 
translations, scarcely ever discusses technicalities. Now and 
then, however, he lets fall an incidental remark which sug- 
gests very definite ideals. In translating Caesar, for ex- 
ample, though at first he planned merely to complete Brend's 

1 The Printer to the Reader, reprinted in Shakespeare's Library, 1875. 

2 To the Reader. 3 ggg Works, ed. Grosart, II, 50. 



130 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

translation, he ended by taking the whole work into his 
own hands, because, as he says, "I was desirous to have 
the body of the whole story compacted uniform and of one 
style throughout," ^ a comment worthy of a much more 
modern critic. Philemon Holland, again, contributes al- 
most nothing to theory, though his vigorous defense of his 
art and his appreciation of the stylistic quahties of his 
originals bear witness to true scholarly enthusiasm. On 
the whole, however, though the distinctive contribution of 
the period is the plea of the renaissance scholars that a 
reasonable faithfulness should be displayed, the comment of 
the mass of translators shows little grasp of the new prin- 
ciples. When one considers, in addition to their very in- 
adequate expression of theory, the prevailing characteristics 
of their practice, the balance turns unmistakably in favor 
of a careless freedom in translation. 

Some of the deficiencies in sixteenth-centmry theory are 
suppHed by Chapman, who appUes himself with consider- 
able zest to laying down the principles which in his opinion 
should govern poetical translations. Producing his ver- 
sions of Homer in the last years of the sixteenth and early 
years of the seventeenth century, he forms a link between 
the two periods. In some respects he anticipates later 
critics. He attacks both the overstrict and the overloose 
methods of translation: 

the brake 
That those translators stick in, that affect 
Their word for word traductions (where they lose 
The free grace of their natural dialect, 
And shame their authors with a forced gloss) 
I laugh to see; and yet as much abhor 
More Ucense from the words than may express 
Their full compression, and make clear the author.^ 

1 Dedication, London, 1590. 

2 To the Reader, in The Iliads of Homer, Charles Scribner's Sons, 
p. xvi. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 131 

It is literalism, however, which bears the brunt of his 
attack. He is always conscious, ''how pedantical and 
absurd an affectation it is in the interpretation of any 
author (much more of Homer) to turn him word for word, 
when (according to Horace and other best lawgivers to 
translators) it is the, part of every knowing and judicial in- 
terpreter, not to follow the nimiber and order of words, 
but the material things themselves, and sentences to weigh 
diUgently, and to clothe and adorn them with words, and 
such a style and form of oration, as are most apt for the 
language in which they are converted." ^ Strangely enough, 
he thinks this literalism the prevailing fault of translators. 
He hardly dares present his work 

To reading judgments, since so gen'rally, 

Custom hath made ev'n th'ablest agents err 

In these translations; all so much apply 

Their pains and cunnings word for word to render 

Their patient authors, when they may as well 

Make fish with fowl, camels with whales, engender, 

Or their tongues' speech in other mouths compell.^ 

Chapman, however, beheves that it is possible to overcome 
the difficulties of translation. Although the ''sense and 
elegancy" of Greek and English are of "distinguished 
natures," he holds that it requires 

Only a judgment to make both consent 
In sense and elocution; and aspire, 
As well to reach the spirit that was spent 
In his example, as with art to pierce 
His grammar, and etymology of words. 

This same theory was taken up by numerous seventeenth 
and eighteenth century translators. Avoiding as it does 
the two extremes, it easily commended itself to the reason. 
Unfortunately it was frequently appropriated by critics 

1 P. XXV. 2 p xy 



132 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

who were not inclined to labor strenuously with the prob- 
lems of translation. One misses in much of the later 
comment the vigorous thinking of the early Renaissance 
translators. The theory of translation was not yet regarded 
as ''a common work of building" to which each might con- 
tribute, and much that was valuable in sixteenth-century 
comment was lost by forgetfulness and neglect. 




IV. FROM COWLEY TO POPE 



I 



IV 
FROM COWLEY TO POPE 

Although the ardor of the EHzabethan translator as he 
approached the vast, almost unbroken field of foreign lit- 
erature may well awaken the envy of his modern successor, 
in many respects the period of Dryden and Pope has more 
claim to be regarded as the Golden Age of the English 
translator. Patriotic enthusiasm had, it is true, lost some- 
thing of its earher fire, but national conditions were in gen- 
eral not unfavorable to translation. Though the seven- 
teenth century, torn by civil discords, was very unlike the 
period which Holland had lovingly described as ''this long 
time of peace and tranquillity, wherein ... all good litera- 
ture hath had free course and flourished," ^ yet, despite 
the rise and fall of governments, the stream of translation 
flowed on almost uninterruptedly. Sandys' Ovid is pre- 
sented by its author, after his visit to America, as ''bred in 
the New World, of the rudeness whereof it cannot but parti- 
cipate; especially having wars and tumults to bring it to 
light instead of the Muses," ^ but the more ordinary trans- 
lation, bred at home in England during the seventeenth 
century, apparently suffered little from the political strife 
which surrounded it, while the eighteenth century afforded 
a "peace and tranquillity" even greater than that which 
had prevailed under Elizabeth. 

1 Preface to the Reader, in The Natural History of C. Plinius Secundus, 
London, 1601. 

2 Dedication, in Ovid^s Metamorphosis, Englished hy G. S., London, 
1640. 

135 



136 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Throughout the period translation was regarded as an 
important labor, deserving of every encouragement. As in 
the sixteenth century, friends and patrons united to offer 
advice and aid to the author who engaged in this work. 
Henry Brome, dedicating a translation of Horace to Sir 
William Backhouse, writes of his own share of the volume, 
"to the translation whereof my pleasant retirement and con- 
veniencies at your delightsome habitation have hberally 
contributed."^ Doctor Barten Holiday includes in his pref- 
ace to a version of Juvenal and Persius an interesting list of 
"worthy friends" who have assisted him. "My honored 
friend, Mr. John Selden (of such eminency in the studies of 
antiquities and languages) and Mr. Farnaby . . . procured 
me a fair copy from the famous library of St. James's, and 
a manuscript copy from our herald of learning, Mr. Cam- 
den. My dear friend, the patriarch of our poets, Ben Jon- 
son, sent in an ancient manuscript partly written in the 
Saxon character." Then follow names of less note, Cas- 
aubon, Anyan, Price.^ Dryden tells the same story. He 
has been permitted to consult the Earl of Lauderdale's 
manuscript translation of Virgil. "Besides this help, which 
was not inconsiderable," he writes, "Mr. Congreve has 
done me the favor to review the Aeneis, and compare my 
version with the original." ^ Later comes his recognition 
of indebtedness of a more material character. "Being in- 
vited by that worthy gentleman. Sir William Bowyer, to 
Denham Court, I translated the First Georgic at his house, 
and the greatest part of the last Aeneid. A more friendly 
entertainment no man ever found. . . . The Seventh 

1 Dedication, in The Poems of Horace rendered into Verse by Several 
Persons, London, 1666. 

* Juvenal and Persius, translated by Barten Holyday, Oxford, 1673 
(published posthumously). 

* Dedication of the Aeneis, in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, 
V. 2, p. 235. 




FROM COWLEY TO POPE 137 

Aeneid was made English at Burleigh, the magnificent 
abode of the Earl of Exeter." ^ 

While private individuals thus rallied to the help of the 
translator, the world in general regarded his work with in- 
creasing respect. The great Dry den thought it not un- 
worthy of his powers to engage in putting classical verse 
into English garb. His successor Pope early turned to the 
same pleasant and profitable task. Johnson, the literary- 
dictator of the next age, described Rowe's version of Lucan 
as "one of the greatest productions of English poetry." ^ 
The comprehensive editions of the works of British poets 
which began to appear towards the end of the eighteenth 
century regularly included English renderings, generally 
contemporaneous, of the great poetry of other coxmtries. 

The growing dignity of this department of literature and 
the Augustan fondness for literary criticism combined to 
produce a large body of comment on methods of translation. 
The more ambitious translations of the eighteenth century, 
for example, were accompanied by long prefaces, contain- 
ing, in addition to the elaborate paraphernalia of contem- 
porary scholarship, detailed discussion of the best rules 
for putting a foreign classic into English. Almost every 
possible phase of the art had been broached in one 
place and another before the century ended. In its 
last decade there appeared the first attempt in EngUsh 
at a complete and detailed treatment of the theory of 
translation as such, Tytler's Essay on the Principles of 
Translation. 

From the sixteenth-century theory of translation, so much 
of which is incidental and uncertain in expression, it is a 
pleasure to come to the deliberate, reasoned statements, 
unmistakable in their purpose and meaning, of the earlier 
critics of our period, men like Denham, Cowley, and Dryden. 

^ Postscript to the Reader^ Essays, v. 2, p. 243. 
2 Rowe, in Lives of the Poets, Dublin, 1804, p. 284. 



138 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

In contrast to the mass of unrelated individual opinions at- 
tached to the translations of Elizabeth's time, the criticism 
of the seventeenth century emanates, for the most part, 
from a smaU group of men, who supply standards for 
lesser commentators and who, if they do not invariably 
agree with one another, are yet thoroughly familiar with. 
one another's views. The field of discussion also has 
narrowed considerably, and theory has gained by becoming 
less scattering. Translation in the seventeenth and eight- 
eenth centuries showed certain new developments, the most 
marked of which was the tendency among translators who 
aspired to the highest rank to confine their efforts to verse 
renderings of the Greek and Latin classics. A favorite 
remark was that it is the greatest poet who suffers most 
in being turned from one language into another. In spite 
of this, or perhaps for this reason, the common ambition 
was to undertake Virgil, who was generally regarded as the 
greatest of epic poets, and attempts to translate at least a 
part of the Aeneid were astonishingly frequent. As early 
as 1658 the Fourth Book is described as "translated . . . 
in our day at least ten times into EngUsh." ^ Horace came 
next in popularity; by the beginning of the eighteenth 
century, according to one translator, he had been "trans- 
lated, paraphrased, or criticized on by persons of all con- 
ditions and both sexes." ^ As the century progressed, 
Homer usurped the place formerly occupied by Virgil as 
the object of the most ambitious effort and the center of 
discussion. But there were other translations of the clas- 
sics. Cooke, dedicating his translation of Hesiod to the 
Duke of Argyll, says to his patron: "You, my lord, know 
how the works of genius lift up the head of a nation above 
her neighbors, and give as much honor as success in arms; 

^ The Argument, in The Passion of Dido for Aeneas, translated by 
Edmund Waller and Sidney Gk>dolphin, London, 1658. 

2 Dedication, in Translations of Horace, John Hanway, 1730. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 139 

among these we must reckon our translations of the classics; 
by which when we have naturahzed all Greece and Rome, 
we shall be so much richer than they by so many original 
productions as we have of our own." ^ Seemingly there 
was an attempt to naturalize "all Greece and Rome." 
Anacreon, Pindar, Apollonius Rhodius, Lucretius, Tibullus, 
Statins, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, Lucan, are names taken 
almost at random from the list of seventeenth and eight- 
eenth-century translations. Criticism, however, was ready 
to concern itself with the translation of any classic, ancient 
or modern. Denham's two famous pronouncements are 
connected, the one with his own translation of the Second 
Book of the Aeneid, the other with Sir Richard Fanshaw's 
rendering of II Pastor Fido. In the later eighteenth century 
voliuninous comment accompanied Hoole's Ariosto and 
Mickle's Camoens. 

At present, however, we are concerned not with the 
number and variety of these translations, but with their 
homogeneity. As translators showed themselves less in- 
clined to wander over the whole field of hterature, the theory 
of translation assumed much more manageable proportions. 
A further limitation of the area of discussion was made by 
Denham, who expressly excluded from his consideration 
^'them who deal in matters of fact or matters of faith," ^ 
thus disposing of the theological treatises which had for- 
merly divided attention with the classics. 

The aims of the translator were also clarified by defini- 
tion of his audience. John Vicars, pubHshing in 1632 The 
XII . Aeneids of Virgil translated into English decasyllables, 
adduces as one of his motives "the common good and public 
utihty which I hoped might accrue to young students and 

1 Dedication, dated 1728, reprinted in The English Poets, London, 
1810, V. 20. 

2 Preface to The Destruction of Troy, in Denham, Poems and Transla- 
tions, London, 1709. 



140 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

grammatical tyros," ^ but later writers seldom repeat this 
appeal to the learner. The next year John Brinsley issued 
VirgiVs Eclogues, with his book De Apibus, translated gram- 
matically, and also according to the propriety of our English 
tongue so far as Grammar and the verse will permit. A sig- 
nificant comment in the ''Directions" runs: ''As for the 
fear of making truants by these translations, a conceit which 
arose merely upon the abuse of other translations, never in- 
tended for this end, I hope that happy experience of this 
kind will in time drive it and all like to it utterly out of 
schools and out of the minds of all." Apparently the 
schoolmaster's ban upon the unauthorized use of transla- 
tions was estabhshing the distinction between the English 
version which might claim to be ranked as literature and 
that which Johnson later designated as "the clandestine 
refuge of schoolboys." ^ 

Another limitation of the audience was, however, less 
admirable. For the widely democratic appeal of the Ehza- 
bethan translator was substituted an appeal to a class, dis- 
tinguished, if one may believe the philosopher Hobbes, as 
much by social position as by intellect. In discussing the 
vocabulary to be employed by the translator, Hobbes pro- 
fesses opinions not unlike those of the sixteenth-century 
critics. Like Puttenham, he makes a distinction between 
words as suited or unsuited for the epic style. "The names 
of instruments and tools of artificers, and words of art," 
he says in the preface to his Homer, "though of use in the 
schools, are far from being fit to be spoken by a hero. He 
may delight in the arts themselves, and have skill in some 
of them, but his glory lies not in that, but in courage, no- 
bihty, and other virtues of nature, or in the command he has 
over other men." In Hobbes' objection to the use of un- 
famihar words, also, there is nothing new; but in the stand- 

* To the courteous not curious reader. 

* Comment on Trapp's "blank version" of Virgil, in Life of Dryden. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 141 

ards by which he tries such terms there is something 
amusingly characteristic of his time. In the choice of 
words, "the first indiscretion is in the use of such words as 
to the readers of poesy (which are commonly Persons of 
the best Quality)" — it is only fair to reproduce Hobbes' 
capitalization — "are not sufficiently known. For the work 
of an heroic poem is to raise admiration (principally) for 
three virtues, valor, beauty, and love; to the reading 
whereof women no less than men have a just pretence 
though their skill in language be not so universal. And 
therefore foreign words, till by long use they become vulgar, 
are unintelligible to them." Dry den is similarly restrained 
by the thought of his readers. He does not try to reproduce 
the "Doric dialect" of Theocritus, "for Theocritus writ to 
Sicilians, who spoke that dialect; and I direct this part of 
my translations to our ladies, who neither understand, nor 
will take pleasure in such homely expressions." ^ In trans- 
lating the Aeneid he follows what he conceives to have been 
Virgil's practice. "I will not give the reasons," he de- 
clares, "why I writ not always in the proper terms of navi- 
gation, land-service, or in the cant of any profession. I will 
only say that Virgil has avoided those properties, because 
he writ not to mariners, soldiers, astronomers, gardeners, 
peasants, etc., but to all in general, and in particular to men 
and ladies of the first quality, who have been better bred 
than to be too nicely knowing in such things." ^ 

Another element in theory which displays the strength 
and weakness of the time is the treatment of the work of 
other countries and other periods. A changed attitude 
towards the achievements of foreign translators becomes 
evident early in the seventeenth century. In the prefaces 
to an edition of the works of Du Bartas in EngUsh there 
are signs of a growing satisfaction with the English language 

^ Preface to Sylvae, Essays, v. 1, p. 266. 

2 Dedication of the Aeneis, Essays, v. 2, p. 236. 



142 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

as a medium and an increasing conviction that England 
can surpass the rest of Europe in the work of translation. 
Thomas Hudson, in an address to James VI of Scotland, 
attached to his translation of The History of Judith, quotes 
an interesting conversation which he held on one occasion 
with that pedantic monarch. ''It pleased your Highness," 
he recalls, "not only to esteem the peerless style of the Greek 
Homer and the Latin Virgil to be inimitable to us (whose 
tongue is barbarous and corrupted), but also to aUege 
(partly through dehght your majesty took in the haughty 
style of those most famous writers, and partly to sound the 
opinion of others) that also the lofty phrases, the grave 
inditement, the facund terms of the French Salust (for the 
hke resemblance) could not be followed nor sujfficiently 
expressed in oiu" rough and unpohshed English language." ^ 
It was to prove that he could reproduce the French poet 
''succinctly and sensibly in our vulgar speech" that Hudson 
undertook the Judith. According to the complimentary 
verses addressed to the famous Sylvester on his translations 
from the same author, the Enghsh tongue has responded 
nobly to the demands put upon it. Sylvester has shown 

. . . that French tongue's plenty to be such. 
And yet that ours can utter full as much.^ 

John Davies of Hereford, writing of another of Sylvester's 
translations, describes English as acquitting itself well when 
it competes with French, and continues 

If French to English were so strictly bound 
It would but passing lamely strive with it; 
And soon be forc'd to lose both grace and ground, 
Although they strove with equal skill and wit.^ 

1 In Du Bartas, His Divine Words and Works, translated by Syl- 
vester, London, 1641. 

2 Lines by E. G., same edition. 
^ Same edition, p. 322. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 143 

An opinion characteristic of the latter part of the century 
is that of the Earl of Roscommon, who, after praising the 
work of the earlier French translators, says, 

From hence our generous emulation came, 
We undertook, and we performed the same: 
But now we show the world another way, 
And in translated verse do more than they.* 

Dryden finds little to praise in the French and Italian 
renderings of Virgil. ''Segrais ... is wholly destitute of 
elevation, though his version is much better than that of 
the two brothers, or any of the rest who have attempted 
Virgil. Hannibal Caro is a great name among the Itahans; 
yet his translation is most scandalously mean." ^ "What I 
have said," he declares somewhat farther on, "though it 
has the face of arrogance, yet is intended for the honor of 
my country; and therefore I will boldly own that this 
EngHsh translation has more of Virgil's spirit in it than 
either the French or Italian." ^ 

On translators outside their own period seventeenth- 
century critics bestowed even less consideration than on 
their French or ItaUan contemporaries. Earlier writers 
were forgotten, or remembered only to be condemned. 
W. L., Gent., who in 1628 pubhshed a translation of Vir- 
gil's Eclogues, expresses his surprise that a poet like Virgil 
"should yet stand still as a noli me tang ere, whom no man 
either durst or would undertake; only Master Spenser 
long since translated the Gnat (a httle fragment of Virgil's 
excellence), giving the world peradventure to conceive that 
he would at one time or other have gone through with 
the rest of this poet's work." * Vicars' translation of the 
Aeneid is accompanied by a letter in which the author's 



* An Essay on Translated Verse. 

2 Dedication of the Aeneis, Essays, v. 2, p. 220. 

3 P. 222. * To the worthy reader. 



144 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

cousin, Thomas Vicars, congratulates him on his "great 
pains in transplanting this worthiest of Latin poets into a 
mellow and neat English soil (a thing not done before)." ^ 
Denham announces, ''There are so few translations which 
deserve praise, that I scarce ever saw any which deserved 
pardon; those who travail in that kind being for the most 
part so unhappy as to rob others without enriching them- 
selves, pulling down the fame of good authors without 
raising their own. Brome,^ writing in 1666, rejoices in 
the good fortune of Horace's ''good friend Virgil . . . who 
being plundered of all his ornaments by the old translators, 
was restored to others with double lustre by those standard- 
bearers of wit and judgment, Denham and Waller," ^ and 
in proof of his statements puts side by side translations of 
the same passage by Phaer and Denham. Later, in 1688, 
an anonjTiious writer recalls the work of Phaer and Stany- 
hurst only to disparage it. Introducing his translation of 
Virgil, "who has so long unhappily continued a stranger to 
tolerable English," he says that he has "observed how 
Player and Stainhurst of old . . . had murdered the most 
absolute of poets." * One dissenting note is found in Robert 
Gould's lines prefixed to a 1687 edition of Fairfax's Godfrey 
of Bulloigne. 

See here, you dull translators, look with shame 
Upon this stately monument of fame, 
And to amaze you more, reflect how long 
It is, since first 'twas taught the English tongue: 
In what a dark age it was brought to Ught; 
Dark? No, our age is dark, and that was bright. 
Of all these versions which now brightest shine, 
Most, Fairfax, are but foils to set ofif thine: 

1 To the courteous not curious reader, in The XII. Aeneids of Virgil, 
1632. 

2 Preface to The Destruction of Troy. 
' Dedication of The Poems of Horace. 

* To the Reader, in The First Book of VirgiVs Aeneis, London, 1688. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 145 

Ev'n Horace can't of too much justice boast, 
His unaffected, easy style is lost: 
And Ogilby's the lumber of the stall; 
But thy translation does atone for all.^ 

Dryden, too, approves of Fairfax, considered at least as 
a metrist. He includes him with Spenser among the "great 
masters of our language," and adds, "many besides myself 
have heard our famous Waller own that he derived the 
harmony of his numbers from Godfrey of Bulloign, which 
was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax. "^ g^^ even 
Dryden, who sometimes saw beyond his own period, does 
not share the admiration which some of his friends entertain 
for Chapman. "The Earl of Mulgrave and Mr. Waller," 
he writes in the Examen Poeticum, ''two of the best judges 
of our age, have assured me that they could never read over 
the translation of Chapman without incredible pleasure and 
extreme transport. This admiration of theirs must needs 
proceed from the author himself, for the translator has 
thrown him down as far as harsh numbers, improper Eng- 
lish, and a monstrous length of verse could carry him." ^ 

In this sati|faction with their own country and their own 
era there lurked certain dangers for seventeenth-century 
writers. The quality becomes, as we shall see, more notice- 
able in the eighteenth century, when the shackles which Eng- 
lish taste laid upon original poetry were imposed also upon 
translated verse. The theory of translation was hampered 
in its development by the narrow complacency of its ex- 
ponents, and the record of this time is by no means one of 
uniform progress. The seventeenth century shows clearly 
marked alternations of opinion; now it sanctions extreme 
methods; now, by reaction, it inclines towards more mod- 
erate views. The eighteenth century, during the greater 

1 Reprinted in Godfrey of Bulloigne, translated by Fairfax, New York, 
1849. 

2 Essays, v. 2, p. 249. 3 Essays, v. 2, p. 14. 



146 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

part of its course, produces little that is new in the way of 
theory, and adopts, without much attempt to analyze them, 
the formulas left by the preceding period. We may now 
resume the history of these developments at the point where 
it was dropped in Chapter III, at the end of Ehzabeth's 
reign. 

In the first part of the new century the few minor trans- 
lators who described their methods held theories much like 
those of Chapman. W. L., Gent., in the extremely flowery 
and discursive preface to his version of Virgil's Eclogues, 
says, ''Some readers I make no doubt they (the translations) 
will meet with in these dainty mouthed times, that will 
tax me with not coming resolved word for word and line for 
line with the author. ... I used the freedom of a transla- 
tor, not tying myself to the tyranny of a grammatical con- 
struction but breaking the shell into many pieces, was only 
careful to preserve the kernel safe and whole from the 
violence of a wrong or wrested interpretation." After a 
long simile drawn from the hunting field he concludes, ''No 
more do I conceive my course herein to be faulty though I 
do not affect to follow my author so close as to tread upon 
his heels." John Vicars, who professes to have robed Virgil 
in "a homespun English gray-coat plain," says of his man- 
ner, ''I have aimed at these three things, perspicuity of the 
matter, fidelity to the author, and facility or smoothness to 
recreate thee my reader. Now if any critical or curious wit 
tax me with a Frustra fit per plura &c. and blame my not 
curious confinement to my author line for line, I answer 
(and I hope this answer will satisfy the moderate and in- 
genuous) that though peradventure I could (as in my Babel's 
Balm I have done throughout the whole translation) yet 
in regard of the lofty majesty of this my author's style, I 
would not adventure so to pinch his spirits, as to make him 
seem to walk Uke a lifeless ghost. But on thinking on that 
of Horace, Brevis esse laboro ohscurus fio, I presumed (yet 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 147 

still having an eye to the genuine sense as I was able) to 
expatiate with poetical liberty, where necessity of matter 
and phrase enforced." Vicars' warrant for his practice is 
the oftquoted caution of Horace, Nee verhum verbo curabis 
redder e. 

But the seventeenth century was not disposed to con- 
tinue uninterruptedly the tradition of previous translators. 
In translated, as in original verse a new era was to begin, 
acclaimed as such in its own day, and associated like the 
new poetry, with the names of Denham and Cowley as both 
poets and critics and with that of Waller as poet. Pe- 
culiarly characteristic of the movement was its hostility 
towards literal translation, a hostility apparent also, as we 
have seen, in Chapman. ''I consider it a vulgar error in 
translating poets," writes Denham in the preface to his 
Destruction of Troy, "to affect being Fidus Interpres," and 
again in his lines to Fanshaw: 

That servile path thou nobly dost decline 

Of tracing word by word, and line by line. 

Those are the labored births of slavish brains, 

Not the effect of poetry but pains; 

Cheap, vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords 

No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words. 

Sprat is anxious to claim for Cowley much of the credit 
for introducing ''this way of leaving verbal translations and 
chiefly regarding the sense and genius of the author," which 
''was scarce heard of in England before this present age." ^ 
Why Chapman and later translators should have fixed 
upon extreme literalness as the besetting fault of their pred- 
ecessors and contemporaries, it is hard to see. It is true 
that the recognition of the desirability of faithfulness to the 
original was the most distinctive contribution that six- 

^ Sprat, Life of Cowley, in Prose Works of Abraham Cowley, London,. 
1826. 



148 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

teenth-century critics made to the theory of translation, 
but this principle was largely associated with prose render- 
ings of a different type from that now under discussion. 
If, like Denham, one excludes '^ matters of fact and matters 
of faith," the body of translation which remains is scarcely 
distinguished by slavish adherence to the letter. As a 
matter of fact, however, sixteenth-century translation was 
obviously an unfamiliar field to most seventeenth-century 
commentators, and although their generalizations include 
all who have gone before them, their illustrations are usually 
drawn from the early part of their own century. Ben Jon- 
son, whose translation of Horace's Art of Poetry is cited 
by Dry den as an example of ''metaphrase, or turning an 
author word by word and line by line from one language 
to another," ^ is perhaps largely responsible for the mis- 
taken impression regarding the earher translators. Thomas 
May and George Sandys are often included in the same cate- 
gory. Sandys' translation of Ovid is regarded by Dryden 
as typical of its time. Its hterahsm, its resulting lack of 
poetry, ''proceeded from the wrong judgment of the age in 
which he hved. They neither knew good verse nor loved 
it; they were scholars, 'tis true, but they were pedants; 
and for all their pedantic pains, all their translations want 
to be translated into English." ^ 

But neither Jonson, Sandys, nor May has much to say 
with regard to the proper methods of translation. The most 

1 Preface to the Translation of Ovid's Epistles, Essays, v. 1, p. 237. 

2 Dedication of Examen Poeticum, Essays, v. 2, p. 10. Johnson, 
writing of the latter part of the seventeenth century, says, "The au- 
thority of Jonson, Sandys, and Holiday had fixed the judgment of the 
nation" {The Idler, 69), and Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of 
Translation, 1791, says, "In poetical translation the English writers of 
the sixteenth, and the greatest part of the seventeenth century, seem to 
have had no other care than (in Denham's phrase) to translate language 
into language, and to have placed their whole merit in presenting a 
literal and servile transcript of their original." 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 149 

definite utterance of the group is found in the lines which 
Jonson addressed to May on his translation of Lucan: 

But who hath them interpreted, and brought 
Lucan's whole frame unto us, and so wrought 
As not the smallest joint or gentlest word 
In the great mass or machine there is stirr'd? 
The self same genius! so the world will say 
The sun translated, or the son of May.^ 

May's own preface says nothing of his theories. Sandys 
says of his Ovid, *'To the translation I have given what 
perfection my pen could bestow, by polishing, altering, or 
restoring the harsh, improper, or mistaken with a nicer ex- 
actness than perhaps is required in so long a labor," ^ a 
comment open to various interpretations. His metrical 
version of the Psalms is described as " paraphrastically 
translated," and it is worthy of note that Cowley, in his 
attack on the practice of too hteral translation, should have 
chosen this part of Sandys' work as illustrative of the methods 
which he condemns. For the translators of the new school, 
though professedly the foes of the word for word method, 
carried their hostility to existing theories of translation 
much farther. Cowley begins, reasonably enough, by point- 
ing out the absurdity of translating a poet literally. "If a 
man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, 
it would be thought that one madman had translated an- 
other; as may appear when a person who understands not 
the original reads the verbal traduction of him into Latin 
prose, than which nothing seems more raving. . . . And 
I would gladly know what applause our best pieces of Eng- 
lish poesy could expect from a Frenchman or Italian, if 
converted faithfully and word for word into French or 

1 In Lucan's Pharsalia, translated May, 1659. 

2 To the Reader, in Ovid's Metamorphosis, translated Sandys, 
London, 1640. 



150 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Italian prose." ^ But, ignoring the possibility of a reason- 
able regard for both the original and the EngUsh, such £is 
had been advocated by Chapman or by minor translators 
Hke W. L. and Vicars, Cowley suggests a more radical 
method. Since of necessity much of the beauty of a poem 
is lost in translation, the translator must supply new beau- 
ties. "For men resolving in no case to shoot beyond the 
mark," he says, '4t is a thousand to one if they shoot not 
short of it." ''We must needs confess that after all these 
losses sustained by Pindar, all we can add to him by our wit 
or invention (not deserting still his subject) is not hkely to 
make him a richer man than he was in his own country." 
Finally comes a definite statement of Cowley's method: 
''Upon this ground I have in these two Odes of Pindar 
taken, left out and added what I please; nor make it so 
much my aim to let the reader know precisely what he 
spoke as what was his way and manner of speaking, which 
has not been yet (that I know of) introduced into Enghsh, 
though it be the noblest and highest kind of writing in 
verse." Denham, in his lines on Fanshaw's translation of 
Guarini, had already approved of a similar method: 

A new and nobler way thou dost pursue 
To make translations and translators too. 
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame, 
True to his sense, but truer to his fapae. 
Feeding his current, where thou find'st it low 
Let'st in thine own to make it rise and flow; 
Wisely restoring whatsoever grace 
Is lost by change of times, or tongues, or place. 

Denham, however, justifies the procedure for reasons which 
must have had theu' appeal for the translator who was 
conscious of real creative power. "Poesj^," he says in the 
preface to his translation from the Aeneid, "is of so subtle 

1 Preface to Pindaric Odes, reprinted in Essays and other Prose 
Writings, Oxford, 1915. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 151 

a spirit that in the pouring out of one language into an- 
other it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added 
in transfusion, there will remain nothing but a caput mor- 
tuum,^' The new method, which Cowley is willing to 
designate as imitation if the critics refuse to it the name of 
translation, is described by Dry den with his usual clearness. 
''I take imitation of an author in their sense," he says, ''to 
be an endeavor of a later poet to write like one who has 
written before him, on the same subject; that is, not to 
translate his words, or be confined to his sense, but only to 
set him as a pattern, and to write as he supposes that 
author would have done, had he lived in our age, and in 
our country." ^ 

Yet, after all, the new fashion was far from revolution- 
izing either the theory or the practice of translation. Dry- 
den says of Denham that "he advised more liberty than he 
took himself," and of both Denham and Cowley, "I dare 
not say that either of them have carried this libertine way 
of rendering authors (as Mr Cowley calls it) so far as my 
definition reaches; for in the Pindaric Odes the customs and 
ceremonies of ancient Greece are still observed." ^ In the 
theory of the less distinguished translators of the second and 
third quarters of the century, the influence of Denham and 
Cowley shows itself, if at all, in the claim to have trans- 
lated paraphrastically and the complacency with which 
translators describe their practice as ''new," a condition of 
things which might have prevailed without the intervention 
of the method of imitation. About the year 1680 there 
comes a definite reaction against too great liberty in the 
treatment of foreign authors. Thomas Creech, defining 
what may justly be expected of the translator of Horace, 
says, "If the sense of the author is delivered, the variety 
of expression kept (which I must despair of after QuintiUian 

^ Preface to Ovid's Epistles, Essays, v. 1, p. 239. 
2 pp^ 239-40. 



152 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

hath assured us that he is most happily bold in his words) 
and his fancy not debauched (for I cannot think myself 
able to improve Horace) 'tis all that can be expected from a 
version." 1 After quoting with approval what Cowley has 
said of the inadequacy of any translation, he continues: 
^"Tis true he (Cowley) improves this consideration, and 
urges it as concluding against all strict and faithful ver- 
sions, in which I must beg leave to dissent, thinking it bet- 
ter to convey down the learning of the ancients than their 
empty sound suited to the present times, and show the age 
their whole substance, rather than their ghost embodied in 
some light air of my own." An anonymous writer presents 
a group of critics who are disgusted with contemporary 
fashions in translation and wish to go back to those which 
prevailed in the early part of the century .^ 

Acer, incensed, exclaimed against the age, 

Said some of our new poets had of late 

Set up a lazy fashion to translate, 

Speak authors how they please, and if they call 

Stuff they make paraphrase, that answers all. 

Pedantic verse, effeminately smooth, 

Racked through all little rules of art to soothe, 

The soft'ned age industriously compile. 

Main wit and cripple fancy all the while. 

A license far beyond poetic use 

Not to translate old authors but abuse 

The wit of Romans; and their lofty sense 

Degrade into new poems made from thence. 

Disguise old Rome in our new eloquence. 

Aesculape shares the opinion of Acer. 

And thought it fit wits should be more, confined 
To author's sense, and to their periods too, 

^ Dedication to Dry den, 1684, in The Odes, Satires, and Epistles of 
Horace done into English, London, 1688. 

^ Metellus his Dialogues, Relation of a Journey to Tunhridge Wells, 
with the Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid in English, London, 1693. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 153 

Must leave out nothing, every sense must do, 
And though they cannot render verse for verse, 
Yet every period's sense they must rehearse. 

Finally Metellus, speaking for the group, orders Laelius, 
one of their number, to translate the Fourth Book of the 
Aeneid, keeping himself in due subordination to Virgil. 

We all bid then translate it the old way 
Not a-la-mode, but like George Sandys or May; 
Show Virgil's every period, not steal sense 
To make up a new-fashioned poem thence. 

Other translators, though not defending the literal method, 
do not advocate imitation. Roscommon, in the Essay on 
Translated Verse, demands fidelity to the substance of the 
original when he says, 

The genuine sense, intelligibly told. 
Shows a translator both discreet and bol^. 
Excursions are inexpiably bad. 
And 'tis much safer to leave out than add, 

but, unlike Phaer, he forbids the omission of difficult pas- 
sages : 

Abstruse and mystic thoughts you must express, 
With painful care and seeming easiness. 

Dryden considers the whole situation in detail.^ He ad- 
mires Cowley's Pindaric Odes and admits that both Pindar 
and his translator do not come under ordinary rules, but 
he fears the effect of Cowley's example ''when writers of 
unequal parts to him shall imitate so bold an undertaking," 
and believes that only a poet so ''wild and ungovernable" 
as Pindar justifies the method of Cowley. "If Virgil, or 
Ovid, or any regular intelligible authors be thus used, 'tis 
no longer to be called their work, when neither the thoughts 
nor words are drawn from the original; but instead of them 

^ Preface to the Translation of Ovid's Epistles, Essays, vol, 1, p. 240. 



154 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

there is something new produced, which is almost the crea- 
tion of another hand. ... He who is inquisitive to know 
an author's thoughts will be disappointed in his expecta- 
tion; and 'tis not always that a man will be contented to 
have a present made him, when he expects the payment of 
a debt. To state it fairly; imitation is the most advanta- 
geous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest 
wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of 
the dead." 

Though imitation was not generally accepted as a stand- 
ard method of translation, certain elements in the theory 
of Denham and Cowley remained popular throughout the 
seventeenth and even the eighteenth century. A favorite 
comment in the compUmentary verses attached to trans- 
lations is the assertion that the translator has not only 
equaled but surpassed his original. An extreme example of 
this is Dryden's fatuous reference to the Earl of Mulgrave's 
translation of Ovid: 

How will sweet Ovid's ghost be pleased to hear 
His fame augmented by an English peer, 
How he embellishes his Helen's loves, 
Outdoes his softness, and his sense improves.^ 

His earlier lines to Sir Robert Howard on the latter's trans- 
lation of the Achilleis of Statins are somewhat less bald: 

To understand how much we owe to you, 

We must your numbers with your author's view; 

Then shall we see his work was lamely rough. 

Each figure stiff as if designed in buff; 

His colours laid so thick on every place. 

As only showed the paint, but hid the face; 

But as in perspective we beauties see 

Which in the glass, not in the picture be, 

^ To the Earl of Roscommon on his excellent Essay on Translated 
Verse. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 155 

So here our sight obhgingly mistakes 

That wealth which his your bounty only makes. 

Thus vulgar dishes are by cooks disguised, 

More for their dressing than their substance prized. ^ 

It was especially in cases where the original lacked smooth- 
ness and perspicuity, the qualities which appealed most 
strongly to the century, that the claim to improvement was 
made. Often, however, it was associated with notably ac- 
curate versions. Cartwright calls upon the readers of HoH- 
day's Persius, 

who when they shall view 
How truly with thine author thou dost pace, 
How hand in hand ye go, what equal grace 
Thou dost observe with him in every term, 
They cannot but, if just, justly affirm 
That did your times as do your lines agree, 
He might be thought to have translated thee, 
But that he's darker, not so strong; wherein 
Thy greater art more clearly may be seen. 
Which does thy Persius' cloudy storms display 
With lightning and with thunder; both which lay 
Couched perchance in him, but wanted force 
To break, or light from darkness to divorce. 
Till thine exhaled skill compressed it so, 
That forced the clouds to break, the light to show, 
The thunder to be heard. That now each child 
Can prattle what was meant ; whilst thou art styled 
Of all, with titles of true dignity 
For lofty phrase and perspicuity .^ 

J. A. addresses Lucretius in lines prefixed to Creech's trans- 
lation, 

But Lord, how much you're changed, how much improv'd! 

Your native roughness all is left behind, 

But still the same good man tho' more refin'd,^ 

1 In Sir Robert Howard's Poems, London, 1660. 

2 In Holiday's Persius, Fifth Edition, 1650. 

3 In Creech's Lucretius, Third Edition, Oxford, 1683. 



156 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

and Otway says to the translator: 

For when the rich original we peruse, 

And by it try the metal you produce, 

Though there indeed the purest ore we find, 

Yet still by you it something is refined; 

Thus when the great Lucretius gives a loose 

And lashes to her speed his fiery Muse, 

Still with him you maintain an equal pace, 

And bear full stretch upon him all the race; 

But when in rugged way we find him rein 

His verse, and not so smooth a stroke maintain, 

There the advantage he receives is found, 

By you taught temper, and to choose his ground. ^ 

So authoritative a critic as Roscommon, however, seems to 
oppose attempts at improvement when he writes, 

Your author always will the best advise. 
Fall when he falls, and when he rises, rise, 

a precept which Tytler, writing at the end of the next cen- 
tury, considers the one doubtful rule in The Essay on Trans- 
lated Verse. ''Far from adopting the former part of this 
maxim," he declares, ''I consider it to be the duty of a 
poetical translator, never to suffer his original to fall. He 
must maintain with him a perpetual contest of genius; 
he must attend him in his highest flights, and soar, if he can, 
beyond him: and when he perceives, at any time a dimin- 
ution of his powers, when he sees a drooping wing, he must 
raise him on his own pinions." ^ 

The influence of Denham and Cowley is also seen in what 
is perhaps the most significant element in the seventeenth- 
century theory of translation. These men advocated 
freedom in translation, not because such freedom would 
give the translator a greater opportunity to display his own 

1 In Creech's Lucretius, Third Edition, Oxford, 1683. 

2 Essay on the Principles of Translation, Everyman's Library, 
pp. 45-6. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 157 

powers, but because it would enable him to reproduce more 
truly the spirit of the original. A good translator must, 
first of all, know his author intimately. Where Denham's 
expressions are fuller than Virgil's, they are, he says, ''but 
the impressions which the often reading of him hath left 
upon my thoughts." , Possessing this intimate acquaintance, 
the English writer must try to think and write as if he were 
identified with his author. Dryden,^ who, in spite of his 
general principles, sometimes practised something uncom- 
monly like imitation, says in the preface to Sylvae: "I 
must acknowledge that I have many times exceeded my 
commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even 
sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors 
as no Dutch commentator will forgive me. . . . Where I 
have enlarged them, I desire the false critics would not 
always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but either 
that they are secretly in the poet, or may be fairly deduced 
from him; or at least, if both these considerations should 
fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were 
Hving, and an EngHshman, they are such as he would prob- 
ably have written." ^ 

By a sort of irony the more faithful translator came in 
time to recognize this as one of the precepts of his art, and 
sometimes to use it as an argument against too much lib- 
erty. The Earl of Roscommon says in the preface to his 
translation of Horace's Art of Poetry, " I have kept as close 
as I could both to the meaning and the words of the author, 
and done nothing but what I believe he would forgive if he 
were alive; and I have often asked myself this question." 
Dryden follows his protest against imitation by saying: 
''Nor must we understand the language only of the poet, 
but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which 
are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, indi- 
viduate him from all other writers. When we come thus 
1 Essays, v. 1, p. 252. 



158 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

far, 'tis time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius 
to his, to give his thought either the same turn, if our tongue 
will bear it, or if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or 
destroy the substance." ^ Such faithfulness, according to 
Dry den, involves the appreciation and the reproduction of 
the qualities in an author which distinguish him from others, 
or, to use his own words, 'Hhe maintaining the character 
of an author which distinguishes him from all others, and 
makes him appear that individual poet whom you would 
interpret." ^ Dry den thinks that English translators have 
not sufficiently recognized the necessity for this. ''For 
example, not only the thoughts, but the style and versifica- 
tion of Virgil and Ovid are very different: yet I see, even in 
our best poets who have translated some parts of them, 
that they have confounded their several talents, and, by 
endeavoring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, 
have made them so much alike that, if I did not know the 
originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies which 
was Virgil and which was Ovid. It was objected against a 
late noble painter that he drew many graceful pictures, but 
few of them were hke. And this happened because he 
always studied himself more than those who sat to him. 
In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which 
performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from 
another." 

But critics recognized that study and pains alone could 
not furnish the translator for his work. ''To be a thorough 
translator," says Dryden, '^he must be a thorough poet," ^ 
or to put it, as does Roscommon, somewhat more mildly, 
he must by nature possess the more essential characteristics 
of his author. Admitting this, Creech writes with a slight 
air of apology, ''I cannot choose but smile to think that I, 
who have . . . too httle ill nature (for that is commonly 

1 Preface to the Translation of Ovid's Epistles, Essays, v. 1, p. 241. 

2 Preface to Sylvae, Essays, v. 1, p. 254. ' Ibid., p. 264. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 159 

thought a necessary ingredient) to be a satirist, should ven- 
ture upon Horace." ^ Dry den finds by experience that he 
can more easily translate a poet akin to himself. His 
translations of Ovid please him. "Whether it be the par- 
tiality of an old man to his youngest child I know not; but 
they appear to me the best of all my endeavors in this kind. 
Perhaps this poet is more easy to be translated than some 
others whom I have lately attempted; perhaps, too, he was 
more according to my genius." ^ He looks forward with 
pleasure to putting the whole of the Iliad into English. 
''And this I dare assure the world beforehand, that I have 
found, by trial. Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil, 
though I say not the translation will be less laborious; for 
the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin 
poet." ^ The insistence on the necessity for kinship between 
the author and the translator is the principal idea in Ros- 
common's Essay on Translated Verse. According to Ros- 
common, 

Each poet with a different talent writes, 
One praises, one instructs, another bites. 
Horace could ne'er aspire to epic bays, 
Nor lofty Maro stoop to lyric lays. 

This, then, is his advice to the would-be translator: 

Examine how your humour is inclined, 

And which the ruling passion of your mind; 

Then, seek a poet who your way does bend. 

And choose an author as you choose a friend. 

United by this sympathetic bond. 

You grow familiar, intimate, and fond; 

Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree, 

No longer his interpreter but he. 

1 Preface, in Second Edition of Odes of Horace, London, 1688. 



Examen Poeticum, Essays, v. 2, p. 9. 
Preface to the Fables, Essays, v. 2, p. 251. 



160 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Though the plea of reproducing the spirit of the original 
was sometimes made a pretext for undue latitude, it is evi- 
dent that there was here an important contribution to the 
theory of translation. In another respect, also, the con- 
sideration of metrical effects, the seventeenth century shows 
some advance, — an advance, however, which must be laid 
chiefly to the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no 
tendency towards innovation and experiment in the matter 
of verse forms. Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied 
with the couplet and kindred measures, did not consider, as 
the Elizabethans had done, the possibility of introducing 
classical metres. Creech says of Horace, '"Tis certain our 
language is not capable of the numbers of the poet," ^ and 
leaves the matter there. Holiday says of his translation 
of the same poet: ''But many, no doubt, will say Horace is 
by me forsaken, his lyric softness and emphatical Muse 
maimed; that there is a general defection from his genuine 
harmony. Those I must tell, I have in this translation 
rather sought his spirit than numbers; yet the music of 
verse not neglected neither, since the English ear better 
heareth the distich, and findeth that sweetness and air which 
the Latin affecteth and (questionless) attaineth in sapphics 
or iambic measures." ^ Dryden frequently complains of the 
difficulty of translation into English metre, especially when 
the poet to be translated is Virgil. The use of rhyme causes 
trouble. It ''is certainly a constraint even to the best 
poets, and those who make it with most ease. . . . What 
it adds to sweetness, it takes away from sense; and he who 
loses the least by it may be called a gainer. It often makes 
us swerve from an author's meaning; as, if a mark be set 
up for an archer at a great distance, let him aim as exactly 
as he can, the least wind will take his arrow, and divert it 

^ To the Reader, in The Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace, London, 
1688. 

2 Preface to translation of Horace, 1652. 



FROM COWLEY TO FOPE 161 

from the white." ^ The Hne of the heroic couplet is not 
long enough to reproduce the hexameter, and Virgil is es- 
pecially succinct. ''To make him copious is to alter his 
character; and to translate him line for line is impossible, 
because the Latin is naturally a more succinct language 
than either the Italian, Spanish, French, or even than the 
English, which, by reason of its monosyllables, is far the 
most compendious of them. Virgil is much the closest of 
any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet 
than the English heroic." ^ Yet though Dry den admits 
that Caro, the Italian translator, who used blank verse, 
made his task easier thereby, he does not think of abandon- 
ing the couplet for any of the verse forms which earlier 
translators had tried. He finds Chapman's Homer char- 
acterized by ''harsh numbers . . . and a monstrous length of 
verse," and thinks his own period "a much better age than 
was the last ... for versification and the art of num- 
bers." ^ Roscommon, whose version of Horace's Art of 
Poetry is in blank verse, says that Jonson's translation 
lacks clearness as a result not only of his literalness but of 
"the constraint of rhyme," ^ but makes no further attack 
on me couplet as the regular vehicle for translation. 

Dryden, however, is peculiarly interested in the general 
effect of his verse as compared with that of his originals. 
"I have attempted," he says in the Examen Poeticum, "to 
restore Ovid to his native sweetness, easiness, and smooth- 
ness, and to give my poetry a kind of cadence and, as we 
call it, a run of verse, as like the original as the English can 
come to the Latin." ^ In his study of Virgil previous to 
translating the Aeneid he observed "above all, the elegance 

^ Dedication of the Eneis, Essays, v. 2, pp. 220-1. 

2 Preface to Sylvae, Essays, v. 1, pp. 256-7. 

^ Examen Poeticum, Essays, v. 2, p. 14. 

^ Preface. 

5 Essays, v. 2, p. 10. 



162 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

of his expressions and the harmony of his numbers." ^ 
Elsewhere he says of his author, "His verse is everjrwhere 
sounding the very thing in your ears whose sense it bears, 
yet the numbers are perpetually varied to increase the de- 
light of the reader; so that the same sounds are never re- 
peated twice together." ^ These metrical effects he has 
tried to reproduce in Enghsh. "The turns of his verse, his 
breakings, his numbers, and his gravity, I have as far imi- 
tated as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of 
my performance would allow," he says in the preface to 
Sylvae.^ In his translation of the whole Aeneid he was 
guided by the same considerations. "Virgil ... is every- 
where elegant, sweet, and flowing in his hexameters. His 
words are not only chosen, but the places in which he ranks 
them for the sound. He who removes them from the sta- 
tion wherein their master set them spoils the harmony. 
What he says of the Sibyl's prophecies may be as properly 
appUed to every word of his : they must be read in order as 
they He; the least breath discomposes them and some- 
what of their divinity is lost. I cannot boast that I have 
been thus exact in my verses; but I have endeavored to 
follow the example of my master, and am the first EngUsh- 
man, perhaps, who made it his design to copy him in his 
numbers, his choice of words, and his placing them for the 
sweetness of the sound. On this last consideration I have 
shunned the caesura as much as possibly I could: for, 
wherever that is used, it gives a roughness to the verse; of 
which we have Httle need in a language which is overstocked 
with consonants." ^ Views hke these contribute much to 
an adequate conception of what faithfulness in translation 
demands. 

1 Dedication of the Eneis, Essays, v. 2, p. 223. 

2 Preface to Sylvae, Essays, v. 1, p. 255. 

3 Essays, v. 1, p. 258. 

* Dedication of the Eneis, Essays, v. 2, p. 215. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 163 

From the lucid, intelligent comment of Dryden it is dis- 
appointing to turn to the body of doctrine produced by his 
successors. In spite of the widespread interest in transla- 
tion during the eighteenth century, httle progress was made 
in formulating the theory of the art, and many of the volu- 
minous prefaces of translators deserve the criticism which 
Johnson apphed to Garth, ''his notions are half-formed." 
So far as concerns the general method of translation, the 
principles laid down by critics are often mere repetitions of 
the conclusions already reached in the preceding century. 
Most theorists were ready to adopt Dryden's view that the 
translator should strike a middle course between the very 
free and the very close method. Put into words by a 
recognized authority, so reasonable an opinion could hardly 
fail of acceptance. It appealed to the eighteenth-century 
mind as adequate, and more than one translator, professing 
to give rules for translation, merely repeated in his own 
words what Dryden had already said. Garth declares in 
the preface condemned by Johnson: ''Translation is com- 
monly either verbal, a paraphrase, or an imitation. . . . 
The manner that seems most suitable for this present under- 
taking is neither to follow the author too close out of a criti- 
cal timorousness, nor abandon him too wantonly through a 
poetic boldness. The original should always be kept in 
mind, without too apparent a deviation from the sense. 
Where it is otherwise, it is not a version but an imitation." ^ 
Grainger says in the introduction to his Tihullus: "Verbal 
translations are always inelegant, because always destitute 
of beauty of idiom and language; for by their fidehty to 
an author's words, they become treacherous to his reputa- 
tion; on the other hand, a too wanton departure from the 
letter often varies the sense and alters the manner. The 
translator chose the middle way, and meant neither to tread 

^ In Ovid's Metamorphoses translated by Dryden, Addison, Garth, etc., 
reprinted in The English Poets, v. 20. 



164 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

on the heels of Tibullus nor yet to lose sight of him." ^ The 
preface to Fawkes' Theocritus harks back to Dry den: ''A 
too faithful translation, Mr. Dry den says, must be a 
pedantic one. . . . And as I have not endeavored to 
give a verbal translation, so neither have I indulged 
myself in a rash paraphrase, which always loses the spirit 
of an ancient by degenerating into the modern manners of 
expression." ^ 

Yet behind these well-sounding phrases there lay, one 
suspects, little vigorous thought. Both the clarity and the 
honesty which belong to Dryden's utterances are absent 
from much of the comment of the eighteenth century. The 
apparent judicial impartiality of Garth, Fawkes, Grainger, 
and their contemporaries disappears on closer examination. 
In reality the balance of opinion in the time of Pope and 
Johnson inclines very perceptibly in favor of freedom. Im- 
itation, it is true, soon ceases to enter into the discussion of 
translation proper, but literalism is attacked again and again, 
till one is ready to ask, with Dryden, ''Who defends it?" 
Mickle's preface to The Lusiad states with unusual frankness 
what was probably the underlying idea in most of the theory 
of the time. Writing ''not to gratify the dull few, whose 
greatest pleasure is to see what the author exactlj^ says," 
but "to give a poem that might live in the English language," 
Mickle puts up a vigorous defense of his methods. "Lit- 
eral translation of poetry," he insists, "is a solecism. You 
may construe your author, indeed, but if with some trans- 
lators you boast that you have left your author to speak 
for himself, that you have neither added nor diminished, 
you have in reality grossly abused him, and deceived your- 
self. Your hteral translations can have no claim to the 
original fehcities of expression, the energy, elegance, and 
fire of the original poetry. It may bear, indeed, a resem- 

^ Advertisement to Elegies of Tibullus, reprinted in same volume. 
2 Preface to Idylliums of Theocritus, reprinted in same volume. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 165 

blance, but such an one as a corpse in the sepulchre bears 
to the former man, when he moved in the bloom and vigor 
of life. 

Nee verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus 
Interpres — 

was the taste of the Augustan age. None but a poet can 
translate a poet. The freedom which this precept gives 
will, therefore, in a poet's hands, not only infuse the energy, 
elegance, and fire of the author's poetry into his own version, 
but will give it also the spirit of an original." ^ A similarly 
clear statement of the real facts of the situation appears in 
Johnson's remarks on translators. His test for a transla- 
tion is its readability, and to attain this quality he thinks 
it permissible for the translator to improve on his author. 
''To a thousand cavils," he writes in the course of his com- 
ments on Pope's Homer, ''one answer is necessary; the 
purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which 
would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside." ^ 
The same view comes forward in his estimate of Cowley's 
work. "The Anacreon of Cowley, like the Homer of Pope, 
has admitted the decoration of some modern graces, by which 
he is undoubtedly more amiable to common readers, and 
perhaps, if they would honestly declare their own percep- 
tions, to far the greater part of those whom courtesy and 
ignorance are content to style the learned." ^ 

In certain matters, however, the translator claimed 
especial freedom. "A work of this nature," says Trapp of 
his translation of the Aeneid, "is to be regarded in two dif- 
ferent views, both as a poem and as a translated poem." 
This gives the translator some latitude. "The thought and 
contrivance are his author's, but his language and the turn 

^ Dissertation on The Lusiad, reprinted in The English Poets, v. 21. 
2 Pope, in Lives of the Poets, p. 568. 
^ Cowley, in Lives, p. 25. 



166 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

of his versification are his own." ^ Pope holds the same 
opinion. A translator must ''give his author entire and un- 
maimed" but for the rest the diction and versification are 
his own province.^ Such a dictiun was sure to meet with 
approval, for dignity of language and smoothness of verse 
were the very qualities on which the period prided itself. 
It was in these respects that translators hoped to unprove 
on the work of the preceding age. Fawkes, the translator 
of Theocritus, believes that many lines in Dryden's Mis- 
cellany ''will sound very harshly in the pohshed ears of the 
present age," and that Creech's translation of his author can 
be popular only with those who "having no ear for poetical 
numbers, are better pleased with the rough music of the last 
age than the refined harmony of this." Johnson, who 
strongly approved of Dryden's performance, accepts it as 
natural that there should be other attempts at the transla- 
tion of Virgil, ''since the English ear has been accustomed to 
the melHfluence of Pope's numbers, and the diction of 
poetry has become more splendid." ^ There was something 
of poetic justice in this attitude towards the seventeenth 
century, itseK so unappreciative of the achievements of 
earlier translators, but exemplified in practice, it showed 
the peculiar limitations of the age of Pope. 

As in the seventeenth century, the heroic couplet was the 
predominant form in translations. Blank verse, when em- 
ployed, was generally associated with a protest against the 
prevailing methods of translators. Trapp and Brady, both 
of whom early in the century attempted blank verse render- 
ings of the Aeneid, justify their use of this form on the 
ground that it permits greater faithfulness to the original. 
Brady intends to avoid the rock upon which other trans- 

1 Preface of 1718, reprinted in The Works of Virgil translated into 
English blank verse by Joseph Trapp, London, 1735. 

2 Preface to Homer^s Iliad. 

2 Dryden in Lives of the Poets, p. 226. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 167 

lators have split, "and that seems to me to be their trans- 
lating this noble and elegant poet into rhyme; by which 
they were sometimes forced to abandon the sense, and at 
other times to cramp it very much, which inconveniences 
may probably be avoided in blank verse." ^ Trapp makes 
a more violent onslaught upon earher translations, which 
he finds "commonly so very licentious that they can scarce 
be called so much as paraphrases," and presents the em- 
ployment of blank verse as in some degree a remedy for this. 
"The fetters of rhyme often cramp the expression and spoil 
the verse, and so you can both translate more closely and 
also more fully express the spirit of your author without it 
than with it." ^ Neither version however was kindly re- 
ceived, and though there continued to be occasional efforts 
to break away from what Warton calls "the Gothic shackles 
of rhyme" ^ or from the oversmoothjiess of Augustan verse, 
the more popular translators set the stamp of their approval 
on the couplet in its classical perfection. Grainger, who 
translated TibuUus, discusses the possibility of using the 
"alternate" stanza, but ends by saying that he has generally 
"preferred the heroic measure, which is not better suited 
to the lofty sound of the epic muse than to the complaining 
tone of the elegy." ^ Hoole chooses the couplet for his 
version of Ariosto, because it occupies the same place in 
Enghsh that the octave stanza occupies in Italian, and be- 
cause it is capable of great variety. "Of all the various 
styles used by the best poets," he says, "none seems so well 
adapted to the mixed and famihar narrative as that of Dry- 
den in his last production, known by the name of his Fahles, 
which by their harmony, spirit, ease, and variety of versi- 
fication, exhibit an admirable model for a translation of 

1 Proposals for a translation of VirgiVs Aeneis in Blank Verse, 
London, 1713. ^ Preface, op. cit. 

3 Prefatory Dedication, in The Works of Virgil in English Verse, 
London, 1763. ■* Advertisement, op. cit. 



168 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

Ariosto." 1 It was, however, to the regularity of Pope's 
couplet that most translators aspired. Francis, the trans- 
lator of Horace, who succeeded in pleasing his readers in 
spite of his failure to conform with popular standards, puts 
the situation well in a comment which recalls a similar ut- 
terance of Dryden. ''The misfortune of our translators," 
he says, ''is that they have only one style; and consequently 
all their authors, Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, are 
compelled to speak in the same numbers, and the same un- 
varied expression. The free-born spirit of poetry is confined 
in twenty constant syllables, and the sense regularly ends 
with every second line, as if the writer had not strength 
enough to support himself or courage enough to venture 
into a third." ^ 

Revolts against the couplet, then, were few and generally 
unsuccessful. Prose translations of the epic, such as have 
in our own day attained some popularity, were in the eight- 
eenth century regarded with especial disfavor. It was 
known that they had some vogue in France, but that was 
not considered a recommendation. The English transla- 
tion of Madame Dacier's prose Homer, issued by Ozell, 
Oldisworth, and Broome, was greeted with scorn. Trapp, 
in the preface to his Virgil, refers to the new French fashion 
with true insular contempt. Segrais' translation is "almost 
as good as the French language will allow, which is just as 
fit for an epic poem as an ambhng nag is for a war horse. 
. . . Their language is excellent for prose, but quite other- 
wise for verse, especially heroic. And therefore tho' the 
translating of poems into prose is a strange modern inven- 
tion, yet the French transprosers are so far in the right 
because their language will not bear verse." Mickle, men- 
tioning in his Dissertation on the Lusiad that "M. Duperron 
de Castera, in 1735, gave in French prose a loose unpoetical 

^ Preface to Ariosto, reprinted in The English Poets, v. 21. 
2 Preface, reprinted in The English Poets, v. 19. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 169 

paraphrase of the Lusiad," feels it necessary to append in a 
note his opinion that ''a hteral prose translation of poetry 
is an attempt as absurd as to translate fire into water." 

If there was little encouragement for the translator to 
experiment with new solutions of the problems of versifica- 
tion, there was equally little latitude allowed him in the 
other division of his peculiar province, diction. In ac- 
cordance with existing standards, critics doubled their in- 
sistence on Decorum, a quality in which they found the 
productions of former times lacking. Johnson criticizes 
Dryden's Juvenal on the ground that it wants the dignity 
of its original.^ Fawkes finds Creech ''more rustic than any 
of the rustics in the Sicilian bard," and adduces in proof 
many illustrations, from his calling a ''noble pastoral cup 
a fine two-handled pot" to his dubbing his characters 
"Tawney Bess, Tom, Will, Dick" in vulgar English style.^ 
Fanshaw, says Mickle in the preface to his translation of 
Camoens, had not "the least idea of the dignity of the epic 
style." The originals themselves, however, presented ob- 
stacles to suitable rendering. Preston finds this so in the 
case of Apollonius Rhodius, and offers this explanation of 
the matter: "Ancient terms of art, even if they can be made 
intelligible, cannot be rendered, with any degree of grace, 
into a modern language, where the corresponding terms are 
debased into vulgarity by low and familiar use. Many 
passages of this kind are to be found in Homer. They are 
frequent also in Apollonius Rhodius; particularly so, from 
the exactness which he affects in describing everything." ^ 
Warton, unusually tolerant of Augustan taste in this re- 
spect, finds the same difficulty in the Eclogues and Georgics 
of Virgil. "A poem whose excellence pecuHarly consists 
in the graces of diction," his preface runs, "is far more dif- 
ficult to be translated, than a work where sentiment, or 

1 Dryden, in Lives, p. 226. ^ Op. cit. 

3 Preface, reprinted in The British Poets, Chiswick, 1822, v. 90. 



170 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

passion, or imagination is chiefly displayed. . . . Besides, 
the meanness of the terms of husbandry is concealed and lost 
in a dead language, and they convey no low and despicable 
image to the mind; but the coarse and common words I 
was necessitated to use in the following translation, viz. 
plough and sow, wheat, dung, ashes, horse and cow, etc., will, 
I fear, unconquerably disgust many a' delicate reader, if 
he doth not make proper allowance for a modern com- 
pared with an ancient language." ^ According to Hoole, 
the English language confines the translator within narrow 
limits. A translation of Berni's Orlando Innamorato into 
English verse would be almost impossible, 'Hhe narrative 
descending to such familiar images and expressions as would 
by no means suit the genius of our language and poetry." ^ 
The task of translating Ariosto, though not so hopeless, is 
still arduous on this account. ''There is a certain easy 
negligence in his muse that often assumes a playful mode 
of expression incompatible with the nature of our present 
poetry. . . . An English translator will have frequent 
reason to regret the more rigid genius of the language, that 
rarely permits him in this, respect, to attempt even an imi- 
tation of his author." 

The comments quoted in the preceding pages make one 
realize that, while the translator was left astonishingly free 
as regarded his treatment of the original, it was at his peril 
that he ran counter to contemporary literary standards. 
The discussion centering around Pope's Homer, at once the 
most popular and the most typical translation of the period, 
may be taken as presenting the situation in epitome. Like 
other prefaces of the time. Pope's introductory remarks 
are, whether intentionally or unintentionally, misleading. 
He begins, in orthodox fashion, by advocating the middle 

1 Prefatory Dedication, in The Works of Virgil in Rnglish Verse, 
London, 1763. 

2 Preface to Ariosto^ reprinted in The English Poets, v. 21. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 171 

course approved by Dryden. "It is certain," he writes, 
"no literal translation can be just to an excellent original 
in a superior language: but it is a great mistake to imagine 
(as many have done) that a rash paraphrase can make 
amends for this general defect; which is no less in danger 
to lose the spirit of au ancient, by deviating into the modern 
manners of expression." Continuing, however, he urges 
an unusual degree of faithfulness. The translator must 
not think of improving upon his author. "I will venture 
to say," he declares, "there have not been more men misled 
in former times by a servile, dull adherence to the letter, 
than have been deluded in ours by a chimerical insolent 
hope of raising and improving their author. . . . 'Tis a 
great secret in writing to know when to be plain, and when 
poetical and figurative; and it is what Homer will teach us, 
if we will but follow modestly in his footsteps. Where his 
diction is bold and lofty, let us raise ours as high as we can; 
but where his is plain and humble, we ought not to be de- 
terred from imitating him by the fear of incurring the cen- 
sure of a mere English critic." The translator ought to 
endeavor to "copy him in all the variations of his style, 
and the different modulations of his numbers; to preserve, 
in the more active or descriptive parts, a warmth and ele- 
vation; in the more sedate or narrative, a plainness and 
solemnity; in the speeches a fullness and perspicuity; in 
the sentences a shortness and gravity: not to neglect even 
the little figures and turns on the words, nor sometimes the 
very cast of the periods; neither to omit nor confound any 
rites and customs of antiquity." 

Declarations like this would, if taken alone, make one 
rate Pope as a pioneer in the art of translation. Unfor- 
tunately the comment of his critics, even of those who ad- 
mired him, tells a different story. "To say of this noble 
work that it is the best which ever appeared of the kind, 
would be speaking in much lower terms than it deserves," 



172 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

writes Melmoth, himself a successful translator, in Fitz- 
osborne's Letters. Melmoth's description of Pope's method 
is, however, very different from that offered by Pope him- 
self. ''Mr. Pope," he says, "seems, in most places, to have 
been inspired with the same sublime spirit that animates his 
original; as he often takes fire from a single hint in his 
author, and blazes out even with a stronger and brighter 
flame of poetry. Thus the character of Thersites, as it 
stands in the English Iliad, is heightened, I think, with 
more masterly strokes of satire than appear in the Greek; 
as many of those similes in Homer, which would appear, 
perhaps, to a modern eye too naked and unornamented, 
are painted by Pope in all the beautiful drapery of the most 
graceful metaphor'' — a statement backed by citation of 
the famous moonlight passage, which Melmoth finds finer 
than the corresponding passage in the original. There is 
no doubt in the critic's mind as to the desirabihty of im- 
proving upon Homer. ''There is no ancient author," he 
declares, "more likely to betray an injudicious interpreter 
into meannesses than Homer. . . . But a skilful artist 
knows how to embellish the most ordinary subject; and 
what would be low and spiritless from a less masterly pencil, 
becomes pleasing and graceful when worked up by Mr. 
Pope." 1 

Melmoth's last comment suggests Matthew Arnold's re- 
mark, "Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which 
he translates his object, whatever it may be," ^ but in in- 
tention the two criticisms are very different. To the average 
eighteenth-century reader Homer was entirely acceptable 
"when worked up by Mr. Pope." Slashing Bentley might 
declare that it "must not be called Homer," but he admitted 
that "it was a pretty poem." Less competent critics, un- 
hampered by Bentley's scholarly doubts, thought the work 

1 Pp. 53-4. 

2 Essays, Oxford Edition, p. 258. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 173 

adequate both as a poem and as a translated poem. Dennis, 
in his Remarks upon Pope's Homer, quotes from a recent 
review some characteristic phrases. ''I know not which I 
should most admire," says the reviewer, ''the justness of 
the original, or the force and beauty of the language, or the 
sounding variety of the numbers." ^ Prior, with more 
honesty, refuses to bother his head over "the justness of 
the original," and gratefully welcomes the English version. 

Hang Homer and Virgil; their meaning to seek, 

A man must have pok'd into Latin and Greek; 

Those who love their own tongue, we have reason to hope, 

Have read them translated by Dryden and Pope.^ 

In general, critics, whether men of letters or Grub Street 
reviewers, saw both Pope's Iliad and Homer's Iliad through 
the medium of eighteenth-century taste. Even Dennis's 
onslaught, which begins with a violent contradiction of the 
hackneyed tribute quoted above, leaves the impression that 
its vigor comes rather from personal animus than from dis- 
trust of existing literary standards or from any new and in- 
dividual theory of translation. 

With the romantic movement, however, comes criticism 
which presents to us Pope's Iliad as seen in the light of com- 
mon day instead of through the flattering illusions which 
had previously veiled it. New translators like Macpherson 
and Cowper, though too courteous to direct their attack 
specifically against the great Augustan, make it evident 
that they have adopted new standards of faithfulness and 
that they no longer admire either the diction or the versi- 
fication which made Pope supreme among his contempora- 
ries. Macpherson gives it as his opinion that, although 
Homer has been repeatedly translated into most of the 
languages of modern Europe, "these versions were rather 

1 Mr. Dennis's Remarks upon Pope's Homer, London, 1717, p. 9. 

2 In Dovm HalL a Ballad. 



174 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

paraphrases than faithful translations, attempts to give the 
spirit of Homer, without the character and pecuharities of 
his poetry and diction," and that translators have failed 
especially in reproducing ''the magnificent simphcity, if 
the epithet may be used, of the original, which can never be 
characteristically expressed in the antithetical quaintness 
of modern fine writing." ^ Cowper's prefaces show that 
he has given serious consideration to all the opinions of the 
theorists of his century, and that his own views are funda- 
mentally opposed to those generally professed. His own 
basic principle is that of fidelity to his author, and, hke every 
sensible critic, he sees that the translator must preserve a 
mean between the free and the close methods. This ap- 
proval of compromise is not, however, a mere formula; 
Cowper attempts to throw light upon it from various angles. 
The couplet he immediately repudiates as an enemy to 
fidehty. ''I wiU venture to assert that a just translation 
of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible," he declares. 
"No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing 
every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the 
same time the full sense of his original. The translator's 
ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and 
the readier he is at invention and expedient, the more likely 
he is to be betrayed into the wildest departures from the 
guide whom he professes to follow." ^ The popular idea 
that the translator should try to imagine to himseh the 
style which his author would have used had he been writing 
in English is to Cowper "a direction which wants nothing 
but practicabihty to recommfend it. For suppose six per- 
sons, equally qualified for the task, employed to translate 
the same Ancient into their own language, with this rule to 

1 Preface to The Iliad of Homer, translated by James Macpherson, 
London, 1773. 

2 Preface to first edition, taken from The Iliad of Homer, translated 
by the late William Cowper, London, 1802. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 175 

guide them. In the event it would be found that each had 
fallen on a manner different from that of all the rest, and by 
probable inference it would follow that none had fallen on 
the right." ^ 

Cowper's advocacy of Miltonic blank verse as a suitable 
vehicle for a translation of Homer need not concern us here, 
but another innovation on which he lays considerable stress 
in his prefaces helps to throw light on the practice and the 
standards of his immediate predecessors. With more 
veracity than Pope, he represents himself as having followed 
his author even in his ''plainer" passages. "The passages 
which will be least noticed, and possibly not at all, except 
by those who shall wish to find me at a fault," he writes in 
the preface to the first edition, "are those which have cost 
me abundantly the most labor. It is difficult to kill a sheep 
with dignity in a modern language, to slay and prepare it 
for the table, detailing every circumstance in the process. 
Difficult also, without sinking below the level of poetry, to 
harness mules to a wagon, particularizing every article of 
their furniture, straps, rings, staples, and even the tying of 
the knots that kept all together. Homer, who writes al- 
ways to the eye with all his sublimity and grandeur, has the 
minuteness of a Flemish painter." In the preface to his 
second edition he recurs to this problem and makes a sig- 
nificant comment on Pope's method of solving it. "There 
is no end of passages in Homer," he repeats, "which must 
creep unless they be lifted; yet in all such, all embellish- 
ment is out of the question. The hero puts on his clothes, 
or refreshes himself with food and wine, or he yokes his 
steeds, takes a journey, and in the evening preparation is 
made for his repose. To give relief to subjects prosaic as 
these without seeming unseasonably tumid is extremely 
difficult. Mr. Pope abridges some of them, and others he 

1 Preface to first edition, taken from The Iliad of Homer, translated 
by the late William Cowper, London, 1802. 



176 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

omits; but neither of these liberties was compatible with 
the nature of my undertaking." ^ 

That Cowper's reaction against Pope's ideals was not a 
thing of sudden growth is evident from a letter more out- 
spoken than the prefaces. "Not much less than thirty 
years since/' he writes in 1788, ''Alston and I read Homer 
through together. The result was a discovery that there is 
hardly a thing in the world of which Pope is so entirely 
destitute as a taste for Homer. ... I remembered how we 
had been disgusted ; how often we had sought the simphcity 
and majesty of Homer in his EngHsh representative, and had 
found instead of them puerile conceits, extravagant meta- 
phors, and the tinsel of modern embellishment in every 
possible position." ^ 

Cowper's "discovery," starthng, almost heretical at the 
time when it was made, is now Uttle more than a common- 
place. We have long recognized that Pope's Homer is not 
the real Homer; it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, as 
does Mr. Andrew Lang, "It is almost as if he had taken 
Homer's theme and written the poem himself." ^ Yet it is 
surprising to see how nearly the eighteenth-century ambi- 
tion, "to write a poem that will hve in the EngHsh language" 
has been answered in the case of Pope. Though the "tinsel" 
of his embellishment is no longer even "modern," his 
translation seems able to hold its own against later verse 
renderings based on sounder theories. The Augustan 
translator strove to give his work "elegance, energy, 
and fire," and despite the false elegance, we can still 
feel something of true energy and fire as we read the 
Iliad and the Odyssey. 

The truth is that, in translated as in original hterature 

* Preface prepared by Mr. Cowper for a Second Edition^ in edition of 
1802. 

2 Letters, ed. Wright, London, 1904, v. 3, p. 233. 
' History of English Literature, p. 384. 



FROM COWLEY TO POPE 177 

the permanent and the transitory elements are often oddly- 
mingled . The fate of Pope's Homer helps us to reconcile 
two opposed views regarding the future history of verse 
translations. Our whole study of the varying standards 
set for translators makes us feel the truth of Mr. Lang's 
conclusion: "There can be then, it appears, no final English 
translation of Homer. In each there must be, in addition 
to what is Greek and eternal, the element of what is mod- 
ern, personal, and fleeting." ^ The translator, it is obvious, 
must speak in the dialect and move in the measures of his 
own day, thereby very often failing to attract the attention 
of a later day. Yet there must be some place in our scheme 
for the faith expressed by Matthew Arnold in his essays on 
translating Homer, that "the task of translating Homer into 
English verse both will be re-attempted, and may be 
re-attempted successfully." ^ For in translation there is 
involved enough of creation to supply the incalculable 
element which cheats the theorist. Possibly some day 
the miracle may be wrought, and, in spite of changing 
Hterary fashions, we may have our EngUsh version of 
Homer in a form sufficient not only for an age but for 
all time. 

It is this incalculable quahty in creative work that has 
made theorizing on the methods of translation more than a 
mere academic exercise. Forced to adjust itself to the 
facts of actual production, theory has had to follow new 
paths as literature has followed new paths, and in the process 
it has acquired fresh vigor and flexibility. Even as we leave 
the period of Pope, we can see the dull inadequacy of a 
worn-out collection of rules giving way before the honest, 
individual approach of Cowper. "Many a fair precept in 
poetry," says Dryden apropos of Roscommon's rules for 
translation, "is like a seeming demonstration in the mathe- 

^ Preface to The Odyssey of Homer done into English Prose. 
2 Lecture, III, in Essays, p. 311. 



178 EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION 

matics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the 
mechanic operation." ^ Confronted by such discrepancies, 
the theorist has again and again had to modify his ''specious" 
rules, with the result that the theory of translation, though 
a small, is yet a living and growing element in human 
thought. 

1 Preface to Sylvae, in Essays f v. 1, p. 252. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Adlington, William, 89, 94. 

AeKric, 4^5, 15, 55, 56, 58. 

Alfred, 3-4, 15, 17. 

Alexander, 10, 34. 

Amyot, Jacques, xii, 106. 

Andreas, 6, 7. 

Andrew of Wyntoun, 35-6, 39, 

116. 
Arnold, Matthew, xi, 172, 177. 
Arthur, 45. 

Ascham, Roger, 109, 114. 
Augustine, St., 50, 55. 
Authorized Version of 1611, 51, 52, 

54, 60, 61, 66, 68. 

Bacon, Francis, 75. 

Barbour, John, 36-7. 

Barclay, Alexander, 100-1. 

Bay Psalm Book, 77. 

Bentley, Richard, 172. 

Berners, Lord, 101, 105. 

Bevis of Hamtoun, 23, 24. 

Birth of Jesus, 43. 

Bishops' Bible, 58, 59, 67. 

Blood of Hayles, 40. 

Bokenam, Osbern, 8, 16, 40, 43-4, 

46. 
Book of the Knight of La Tour 

Landry, 18. 
B. R., 127-8. 
Bradshaw, Henry, 8. 
Brady, N., 166-7. 
Brende, John, 88-9, 94, 129. 
Brinsley, John, 140. 
Brome, Henry, 136, 144. 



Bryan, Sir Francis, 101, 105. 
Bullokar, John, 95. 
Bullokar, William, 109-10. 

Gaedmon, 6. 

Canticum de Creatione, 15, 20. 

Capgrave, John, 14, 19, 20-1, 22, 

40, 45. 
Carew, Richard, 128. 
Cartwright, WiUiam, 155. 
CastaUo, 51, 61, 70. 
Castle of Love, Grosseteste's, 9, 13. 
Gaxton, WiUiam, 9, 12, 31, 44, 96, 
115. 

Blanchardyn and Eglantine, 
38. 

Charles the Great, 38, 46. 

Eneydos, 35, 38, 39. 

Fayttes of Arms, 12. 

Godfrey of Bullogne, 33. 

Mirror of the World, 12. 

Recuyell of the Histories of 
Troy, 38. 
Gecil, Sir WiUiam, 119, 125. 
Ghaloner, Sir Thomas, 128. 
Ghapman, George, 90, 92, 93, 
130-1, 145, 146, 147, 150, 
161. 
Ghaucer, Geoffrey, 9, 10, 30. 

Franklin's Tale, 30. 

Knight's Tale, 30. 

Legend of Good Women, 8. 

Life of St. Cecilia, 8. 

Man of Law's Tale, 27, 28. 

Romance of the Rose, 8. 



181 



jdHHM 



182 



INDEX 



Chaucer, Geoffrey, Sir Thopas, 24. 
Troilus and Criseyde, 6, 8, 

30-1. 
Cheke, Sir John, 59, 63, 108, 

119, 125-6, 128. 
Child of Bristow, 39-40. 
Chretien de Troyes, 30. 
Cooke, Thomas, 138-9. 
Coverdale, Miles, 50-1, 52, 59, 60, 

64^5, 74. 
Cowley, Abraham, 137, 147, 149- 

50, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 

165. 
Cowper, William, 173, 174 ff. 
Creech, Thomas, 151-2, 155-6, 

158-9, 160, 166, 169. 
Cromwell, Thomas, 51. 
Cursor Mundi, 10. 
Cynewulf, 6. 

Dacier, Mme., 168. 

Danett, Thomas, 90. 

Daniel, Samuel, 87. 

Davies of Hereford, John, 142. 

Denham, Sir John, 137, 139, 144, 

147, 150-1, 154, 156, 157. 
Dennis, John, 173. 
Dolet, Etienne, 99. 
Douglas, Gavin, 107-8. 
Drant, Thomas, lllff. 
Dryden, John, 136-7, 141, 143, 

145, 148, 151, 15a-4, 154^5, 

157-8, 159, 160-1, 162, 163, 

166, 169, 177-8. 

Earl of Toulouse, 23, 27. 

Eden, Richard, 85, 91, 96. 

Elene, 6. 

Ely, Bishop of, 65. 

Elyot, Sir Thomas, 11, 95, 118, 

119-20. 
Emare, 21. 



Fairfax, Edward, 144^5. 

Falls of Princes, Boccaccio's, 7, 

37. 
Fanshaw, Sir Richard, 139, 147, 

169. 
Fawkes, Francis, 164, 166, 169. 
Fleming, Abraham, 109, 114. 
Florio, John, 84, 87, 97. 
Floris and Blanchefior, 45. 
Fortescue, Thomas, 87, 103. 
Foxe, John, 54, 67, 68, 94r-5. 
Francis, Phihp, 168. 
Fraunce, Abraham, 77. 
Fulke, William, 54, 60, 65, 70 ff . 

Garth, Sir Samuel, 163. 
Geneva Bible, 53, 60, 61. 
Geneva New Testament, 59, 61. 
Gesta Romanorum, 28. 
Golagros and Gawain, 21. 
Golden Legend, 41. 
Golding, Arthur, 75-6, 82, 91, 

97-8, 113, 117-8, 129-30. 
Googe, Barnaby, 77. 
Gould, Robert, 144. 
Grainger, James, 163-4, 167. 
Greenway, Richard, 93. 
Grimald, Nicholas, 85, 89, 96, 

121-3. 
Grindal, Archbishop, 68, 
Guevara, 106. 
Guido delle Colonne, 34. 

Hake, Edward, 113-4. 
Handlyng Synne, 42. 
Harrington, Sir John, 85-6, 95, 

100. 
Harvey, Gabriel, 114, 129. 
Hellowes, Edward, 82, 91, 105-6. 
Heywood, Jasper, 111, 116. 
Hobbes, Thomas, 140-1. 



INDEX 



183 



Hoby, Sir Thomas, 82, 89, 90, 

119, 128. 
Holiday, Barten, 136, 155, 160. 
Holy Grail, 31. 
Holland, Philemon, 86, 91-2, 98, 

130, 135. 
Hoole, John, 139, 167, 170. 
Howard, Sir Robert, 154. 
Hudson, Thomas, 142. 
Hue de Rotelande, 21. 
Hyrde, Richard, 81. 

Incestuous Daughter, 13. 
Ipomadon, 21. 

James VI of Scotland, 75, 142. 
Jerome, St., 5, 15, 55-6, 76. 
Johnson, Samuel, 137, 140, 148, 

note, 163, 165, 166, 169. 
Jonson, Ben, 136, 148, 149, 161. 
Joye, George, 50. 

King Alexander, 34. 
King Horn, 26. 
KnoUes, Richard, 129. 

Lang, Andrew, 176, 177. 

Launfal, 7. 

Laurent de Premierfait, 7. 
Layamon, 34. 

LeBone Florence of Rome, 27, 28. 
Life of St. Augustine, 41-2. 
L'Isle, WiUiam, 63, note. 
LoneUch, Harry, 31. 
Love, Nicholas, 41, 43, 45. 
Lydgate, John, 7, 8, 16, 31, 37-8, 
44, 115. 

Macpherson, James, 173-4. 
Malory, Sir Thomas, 26. 
Mancinus, 108. 
Marot, Clement, 75. 



Martin, Gregory, 65, 70-1. 
May, Thomas, 148, 149. 
Melmoth, William, 171, 172. 
Menechmi, trans, of, 128. 
Metellus his Dialogues, 152-3. 
Mickle, WiUiam JuHus, 139, 164^5, 

168-9. 
Milton, John, 75. 
Mirk, John, 10. 
More, Sir Thomas, 52, 53, 63, 67, 

69, 118, 119. 
Morley, Lord, 84-5, 89. 
Morte Arthur, 33. 
Mulgrave, Earl of, 154. 
Munday, Anthony, 102, 103. 

Nash, Thomas, 81, 117. 
Neville, Alexander, 111. 
NichoUs, Thomas, 81, 119. 
North, Sir Thomas, 105, 106. 
Northern Passion, 45. 
Norton, Thomas, 74, 83-4, 118, 
123-5. 

Octavian, 27, 28, 29. 

Orm, 17. 

Otway, Thomas, 156. 

Painter, WiUiam, 102, 103. 

Paris, WiUiam, 11. 

Parker, Archbishop, 54-5, 74. 

Partonope of Blois, 24, 3^3. 

Peele, George, 95. 

Peterson, Robert, 128. 

Pettie, George, 93, 97. 

Phaer, Thomas, 93, 98, 110-1, 

116, 144, 153. 
Polychronicon, 16. 
Pope, Alexander, 137, 165, 166, 

170 ff. 
Preston, W., 169. 
Prior, Matthew, 173. 



184 



INDEX 



Purvey, John, 56, 57-8, 59, 6G-7. 
Puttenham, (?) Richard, 96, 116, 
140, 144, 153. 

Rauj C oily ear, 21. 

Rhemish Testament^ 59, 61, 62, 68, 

70. 
Richard Cceur de Lion, 9-10. 
Ridley, Robert, 67. 
Rivers, Earl, 10-1. 
Roberd of Cisyle, 22-3. 
Robert of Brunne, 22, 34r-5, 42. 
Rolle, Richard, 56, 58-9. 
Romance of Partenay, 18, 24, 29, 

31-2. 
Roscommon, Earl of, 12, 143, 153, 

156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 177. 
Rowe, Nicholas, 137. 



Taverner, Richard, 63, 88. 
Thomas de Cabham, 22. 
Tofte, Robert, 104. 
Torrent of Portyngale, 24, 27. 
Trapp, Joseph, 165, 167, 168. 
Trevisa, John de, 16-17, 18. 
Turbervile, George, 102, 115-6. 
Twyne, Thomas, 113. 
Tyndale, WilUam, 49, 50, 58, 59, 

62, 67, 84, 119. 
Tytler, Alexander, x, 137, 148, 

note, 156. 

UdaU, Nicholas, 81-2, 87-8, 94, 
97, 118, 120-1. 

Vicars, John, 139-40, 143-4, 
146-7, 150. 



Sandys, George, 135, 148, 149. 
Secreta Secretorum, 15-16. 
Sege of Melayne, 24, 
Seneca's Tragedies, trans, of, 109, 

111, 113. 
Sidney, Sir Phihp, 75. 
Sir Eglamour of Artois, 23, 27. 
Sir Percival of Galles, 26. 
Southern, John, 96. 
Sprat, Thomas, 146. 
St. Etheldred of Ely, 10, 22. 
St. Katherine of Alexandria, 13. 
St. Paula, 41. 
Stanyhurst, Richard, 74, 77, 114, 

116, 144. 
Studley, John, 111. 
Surrey, Earl of, 75. 
Sylvester, Joshua, 142. 



W. L., Gent., 143, 146, 150. 
WaUer, Edmund, 144, 145. 
Warde, WiUiam, 88. 
Wars of Alexander, 23, 25. 
Warton, Joseph, 167, 169-70. 
Webbe, WUHam, 93. 
Whetstone, George, 102. 
Willes, Richard, 96-7. 
William of Palerne, 30. 
Wilson, Thomas, 84, 92-3, 119, 

125 fif. 
Winchester, Bishop of, 67-8. 
Wither, George, 75, 76, 77, 78. 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 75. 

Young, Bartholemew, 104. 

Ypotis, 43. 

Ywain and Gawin, 21, 23, 29, 30. 



VITA 

Born 1881, at Aurora, Ontario, Canada. Attended the 
Aurora Public School, the AxKora High School, the Univer- 
sity of Toronto (1898-1902, B.A. 1902), the Ontario Nor- 
mal College (1902-3), Columbia University (1908-9, 1910- 
12, A.M. 1909). 



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